GI Joe SERE: Part 3
by Jaenelle Angelline
Summary: Continuation of SERE.The Joes try to get Cam out of custody so the court martial can proceed, and uncover surprises from Cam's past. COMPLETE.
1. Chapter 43: Base

**Chapter 43: Base**

"Yes, my name is Clayton Abernathy, I'm trying to find out if a friend of mine is being held there."

It was eight thirty Monday morning; Clayton figured that was a good time to call the ICE office in Manhattan. He'd barely been able to sleep that night, wondering where Cam was. Was she safe? She'd just come out of surgery, what was happening to her now? He'd gotten up after barely a few hours rest and went online, looking for ICE offices in New York.

Now he was starting at the top of the list and going down, and across the table from him, Allie and Shana were doing the same. They'd decided to try calling as concerned friends first; Alex reasoning that if Broadview actually had been the one to tip ICE off that Cam could possibly be illegal, any queries from someone claiming to be military might spur ICE into moving Cam across the country. And they wanted to prevent that at all costs.

"Name?" the bored voice on the other end of the phone asked.

"Cameron Arlington. She was being picked up at Staten Island University Hospital on Sunday after undergoing reconstructive surgery the day before when she and her ride were accosted by DHS and she was detained for being illegal. I'm trying to find her now."

"All right. Let me have your name and a contact number and you'll know when we find something."

"I'm not getting off this phone until someone tells me something. She had surgery Saturday afternoon, she was released from the hospital on Sunday afternoon and right now she needs to be in bed resting somewhere. When they arrested her she didn't even have the prescriptions she needs. I need you to tell me which hospital she's in."

The voice on the other end of the phone snorted. "We don't move that fast. Especially not for another illegal Mexican immigrant mooching off our free healthcare on my tax dollars."

"Hey. She's not Mexican, she's Native American and Asian. And she was not illegal. She just doesn't have the paper proving she was adopted."

"Ah. An illegal chink mooching off our healthcare."

Clayton was so pissed he didn't even think about what he was saying. "She is not illegal, and she is not a chink. I resent that. And she's not mooching off anyone's tax dollars, her surgery is going to be properly vouchered and paid for! And I've had it with your rudeness. I want to speak to your supervisor." The voice took a breath to say something, but Clayton cut him off. "No. Now. Yes, I'll hold. All day, if I have to. Now get me someone civil to talk to!"

Despite his assertions that he would hold all day if he had, to Clayton was starting to fear that would indeed be the case when another voice finally came on the line. "I heard you wanted to speak to a supervisor?"

"Yes, I did." The voice was female, brisk and businesslike, and Clayton forced himself to rein in his irritation and his anger. Neither would be productive here. "I'm looking for a friend of mine, Cameron Arlington. She was released from Staten Island University Hospital yesterday after undergoing some delicate reconstructive surgery, and the friend who went out there to pick her up said they were stopped in the parking lot by Homeland Security and Cameron was arrested for being illegal."

"I'm sorry to hear that, could you tell me what race Ms. Arlington was?"

"She's part Native American and part Asian."

"Some Native Americans can look like Mexicans. Is she dark-complected?"

"Cameron Arlington looks Asian except for the color of her skin. Her father was a member of the Iroquois tribe and her skin color reflects that. Her mother, however was Asian. Her father was an Air Force Captain." He could hear the sound of computer keys clicking on the other end of the phone, and Scarlett, Allie, Alex and Olivia had gone silent as they listened to his conversation.

"Well, I'm sorry to say I can't find her in the system."

"You have to be kidding. Could someone have posed as Homeland Security and taken her away? The friend who went to pick her up said she was never read her rights."

The voice on the other end went stiff. "That's because she doesn't have any rights. She's illegal."

"She is _not_ illegal. She's Native American, for Christ's sake, she's got more right to be here than most of the rest of us! Why does everyone keep saying she is? In America, you're innocent until proven guilty."

"American citizens are innocent until proven guilty. Illegal immigrants are not American citizens, so therefore that rule does not apply."

"You're kidding." Clayton felt like someone had hit him over the head. "That's unconstitutional."

"No. That's the law. She is illegal until she proves to us she isn't."

"Fine. Then let her go on bond until she proves it."

"Sir, I keep telling you she is not an American citizen so those rights do not apply. Do you want me to lay it out for you? Okay. Because she is illegal, she cannot be freed on bond, nor can anyone post it for her. She is not entitled to a free lawyer; if you're _that_ concerned you can pay for one for her. She is not entitled to free phone calls; once she is settled into a holding facility a certain amount of money can be deposited into her prison fund so she can make calls or she can perform work around the deportation camp to pay for any phone calls she wishes to make, letters she wants to write, or extra food items she may wish to have. If you write any letters to her they will be opened and checked for contraband prior to her receiving them. She will have to perform work at whatever camp she may happen to be in order to acquire money to purchase paper, envelopes and writing utensils from the prison commissary, and stamps will only be issued when she has completed the requisite amount of work and her letters have been duly checked for factuality and relevance. Any mail she attempts to send that is in violation of those rules will be confiscated and privileges will be withheld until she can earn them back."

Across the table Allie and Shana both looked shocked. Alex was listening with narrowed eyes, and Olivia looked like she was on the verge of tears. "If she doesn't have rights, then what do you consider privileges?" Clayton couldn't believe what he was hearing; how could a country whose constitution listed 'inalienable human rights' suddenly turn into…this? How could the government he worked for, fought for, and supported, countenance this kind of massive violation of civil rights?

"Privileges that can and will be taken away for infractions on any of these rules include being forbidden to work around the detainee camp, corrective confinement, reduced or no visitation hours."

He felt defeated. "Cameron had just been released from the hospital after reconstructive surgery. Please tell me she will at least receive adequate medical care to prevent infection and other possible consequences."

"She will receive medical care. We aren't barbarians, Mr. Abernathy."

"All right. Can you at least tell me where she is so I can let her know we're working on getting her out of wherever she is?"

"I told you. I cannot find her in the system."

"What do you mean you can't find her? Do you have her or don't you?" his temper was rising again and he wasn't sure he could keep it under control this time…or that he even wanted to. It would be such a relief, if only short term, for him to be able to yell at this little government toad on the other end of the phone.

"Look, Mr. Abernathy, you have to understand something. The ICE currently detains almost half a million illegals currently within our system, which was never designed to hold this many people, and our budget is woefully inadequate. We do not have a real-time database for tracking the placement of every illegal picked up by DHS and ICE. When this office fields a request, we take the name of the person being looked for—that would be this Arlington you mentioned; the name of the person doing the looking, that would be you; and a phone number where you can be reached. This will be circulated to all two hundred and sixty of the facilities where we are currently holding detainees, from local prisons within whose walls we rent cell space to detainee centers to private prisons. The officials there will check Arlington's name against the list of detainees and new arrivals. When her name is located she will be informed that you are looking for her and she will be asked if she has money to call you back. If she does you will hear from her. If she does not someone will call you and let you know what center she is in."

"She doesn't need money. She can call me collect."

"No, Mr. Abernathy, she cannot. The rules say she must have money in her prison fund in order to make a call."

"But…she was arrested as she was leaving the hospital. She has no money on her."

"Then she'll have to work around the prison or the detainee camp in order to earn enough for a call. The standard rate is $10 for a five minute call."

"That's exorbitant!" Clayton was sputtering. "How long will it take to earn that much? Two days?"

"Work performed around the deportation camp is paid for at the rate of a dollar a day."

His jaw dropped. "Ten days! She has to work for ten days just to make a phone call? She is injured, she just had surgery, she risks tearing the stitches if she spends too much time standing or overdoes it on the physical activity!"

"Then she will have to wait until she is well enough to work before she can call you. In the meantime, however, you will be informed of where she is."

"Will I be able to visit?"

"She will need to fill out a visitors request form and this will have to be approved by the head of the facility she is held in, and then approved again by the head of the nearest ICE office. Once that is given you will be allowed to visit. But you are not allowed to bring any items to give her, you must be dressed correctly according to prison rules and you will be subjected to a pat down upon entering and upon leaving to be sure that you are not smuggling anything in or out."

"You're treating her like a criminal. She hasn't done anything wrong, she just has a missing piece of paper!"

"Without having her file in front of me, Mr. Abernathy, I cannot be sure why she has been detained. I will not have her file until she has been registered into a detention facility and we know what facility she is in. Once I have that I will be able to tell you exactly why she has been determined to be illegal. It is then up to her to prove she is not by providing paperwork that substantiates her claim to legality—or she can sign a deportation agreement acknowledging she is illegal and accept a default judgment of deportation without option of reentry."

"When is her hearing? Her arraignment? Her trial? Have you set that yet?"

"Once again, Mr. Abernathy, she does not have the right to a hearing, arraignment, or trial. She will remain in ICE custody until she proves her claims to legality or until she signs the paper saying she knows she is illegal and accepts deportation without possibility of re-entry. Once she acknowledges guilt she will have the privilege of eventually appearing in front of an immigration judge and make a case for why she should still be allowed to remain in the country, either through her home country being a war zone and she asks for asylum or irreparable hardship if she has a husband or young children who are here legally and would demonstrably suffer if she is not with them."

"Charlie's suffering now without her," Allie muttered. Shana gave her a hard elbow in the ribs.

"Are there any other questions Mr. Abernathy? None? Good. I have a few for you. Who are you in relation to Arlington?"

"I'm her…employer." Close enough.

"Were you aware that she was illegal?"

"She's not illegal." How many times did he have to repeat himself?

"Mr. Abernathy. You are starting to sound like a broken record."

"I'll keep repeating it as many times as I have to until someone gets it through their thick head. _She. Is. __**Not**__. Illegal._ She is a Native American registered with the Wolf Clan of the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois nation and as such has more right to be here than the rest of us. Including me."

"Are you legal?"

Clayton stared hard at the phone, as if glaring hard enough at it could fry the ignorant little idiot on the other end. "My family has been well established in a little US city called Denver for more than a century and a half. We are American born to at least the last five generations and I graduated West Point at the top of my class. I trust that is sufficient."

The voice refused to sound cowed. Probably too stupid to know they'd pissed him off. "Are you aware that you, and the company you work for, can face sanctions from the US government, up to and including fines and possible jail time for your CEO for hiring an illegal? We can sue you for hiring Arlington."

The very thought of the ICE suing the US Army and jailing the Commander In Chief of the US Armed Forces, also known as the President of the United States, made Hawk laugh, albeit bitterly. "You're dreaming. It's not going to happen. My company has far more money and power than you. And a lot more people." Yeah. Thousands of troops. "Don't even try it. You're not going to like what happens. Now. I will be informed when she is located?"

"Yes."

"I will await that call." And he slammed his finger down on the speaker button.

Shana and Allie were sitting there shaking their heads. "We thought we're fighting the enemy outside our borders. What happens when our own government is victimizing the American people worse?"

"Why isn't anyone complaining about this? Why are people continuing to push more and more legislation through that allows this kind of infringement and trampling on legal and civil rights? Why isn't anyone doing anything about this?"

Alex sighed. "Because right now the economy sucks. People are losing jobs, and as a result they are losing housing and so forth. They're scared about recession and the economy and 9-11 didn't help. And when people are scared they lash out, and in this case, since the country does indeed have a huge problem with undocumented people and illegals, they become the scapegoats, the target of hatred and anger. The train of thought here is that there are millions of undocumented people here collecting food stamps and assistance and getting healthcare and sending their kids to public schools on taxpayer dollars while they themselves are committing robbery, larceny, fraud, gang activity, drugs, murder, assault, and other violent crimes, and not working or paying taxes. Unfortunately there are criminal illegals who are doing that, but the majority of the undocumented people in this country at this moment are working individuals who have obtained jobs."

"But they aren't paying taxes. I heard something about that."

Alex blew out her breath. "Clayton, think about that, will you? Of course they're paying taxes. Whenever they buy a loaf of bread in the store, they're paying taxes on that. Milk, eggs, all the stuff they need to live, they pay taxes on. Beer, clothing for the kids so they can go to school, no matter how cheap you buy you're still paying taxes on that. Electricity for their residences, phone, water and trash removal and sanitation fees…they're paying taxes on those. One o f the biggest items for these, let's use Hispanics and Latinos as an example—are phone cards with which to call home; Mexico and Central and South American countries like that. Their income may not be taxed going in if they've found an employer to pay them under the table but it is going out. So of course they're paying taxes."

"Why don't they just pay for the papers to become legal then?" Shana asked.

"Have you looked at the prices ICE is charging for the requisite paperwork? Let's use Latinos as our base population here. The average person who lives in Mexico earns $6,000 US dollars a year. Keep that in mind.

"Now, the ICE charges $1,130 to file the paperwork for a temporary resident application. And then they have to pay the ICE an extra $85 to have their fingerprints taken. Once they have that they can come in, but once they're over the border they have ten days to adjust their status from a temporary to a permanent resident. ICE charges $1,020 plus another $85 for fingerprints to do that. An employment authorization costs $380, and the list goes on. So all told, just to get the paperwork filed and fingerprints done will cost the average person over $5,200 US dollars. Then you look at how long ti takes for ICE to process paperwork—in 2010, they were just getting to applications from people in Mexico filed in 1994. That's a wait of 16 years. The paperwork expires, but they can't go anywhere because they're still waiting for a decision—until ICE comes to deport them for being illegal even though they have paperwork in process—that's where the term 'undocumented' comes from. They're basically being deported because it took USCIS too long to look at their applications."

Hawk shook his head. "The whole thing stinks."

Alex nodded. "Yes it does. So let's concentrate on getting Cam out of it."


	2. Chapter 44: Mercy

**Chapter 44: Mercy**

"And so I have no choice but to suspend these proceedings at this time."

Hawk gritted his teeth. Shana and Alex had told him that it would probably end like this, but it still didn't make it any easier. Without Cam available to testify, the court martial couldn't proceed.

Even though he was the one accusing Broadview, Cam was the one who had signed the charges accusing Walker of raping her. And since Walker and Broadview had conspired together to make that happen, the whole thing couldn't proceed until she was there.

He wanted to march across the room and slap that smug self-satisfied smile off Broadview's, and Walker's, faces.

"Trial Counsel will hold this in reserve until such time as this material witness can be produced, the court-martial will proceed. Until then, Corporal Anthony Walker will be returned to his unit, and Colonel Broadview will return to his unit. However, Corporal Walker will be removed from active duty until this is completed, and Colonel Broadview will not be permitted to resume training of SERE candidates. Your role will be purely administrative. Base Commander Colonel Frederick Hilton has agreed to plead guilty and will serve six months in a military prison as determined by this court, forfeit one-third of his pay for six months, and be broken down one pay grade."

Hilton nodded, eyes downcast, and Stalker stepped forward to escort him out of the room.

The judge leaned forward. "Trial Counsel has made me aware that the rape and assault were a direct and traceable attempt to disrupt these proceedings and render this witness unable to testify. If, after General Hawk arranges for Corporal Arlington's release from ICE custody, if it is found that you had a direct hand in calling ICE and making baseless unfounded rumors about the legality of Corporal Arlington's residency here, court will order Trial Counsel to append further charges of witness tampering and obstruction of justice to your record and will be adjudged accordingly."

"I had nothing to do with it, I swear." Broadview loudly declaimed his innocence.

"I hope, for Corporal Arlington's sake, that is true. I would hate to believe that a member of the US Armed Forces would stoop so low for such base personal gain." The judge fixed Clayton with his glare again. "Have you made any further progress in locating the witness?"

"No Sir." It had been four days now since Cam's arrest on Sunday, Olivia told him she'd been doing some discreet digging to find out where Cam was—she had to find something to do with all the extra desk time—but hadn't come up with anything so far. She was still interviewing witnesses and perps, but she was doing so in safe, controlled environments and Captain Cragen had forbidden street duty for her. Much to Clayton's satisfaction.

The military judge dismissed the court, and Stalker came to escort Mitchell and Broadview to the bay as Alex and Shana gathered up their papers. "And that's that," Shana said. "At least we have leave to re-present the case at a later date. The Manual for Courts-Martial says there's no statute of limitations once the judge stops the clock on it."

"But then again, this doesn't happen that often either," Alex reminded her. "If it takes too long for us to find her, straighten everything out and get her out, the military judge may still decide to dismiss those charges. So we still should try to find her as soon as possible."

"We've called every ICE detainee center in the whole state, and none of them has her. Or will admit to having her. I still can't believe they made her disappear just like that."Clayton was still shaking his head over the unfairness of it all.

"We'll find her, Clayton. Eventually, we'll find her."

"And in the meantime, is she going to be allowed to take it easy? Is she getting the proper aftercare for her surgery? Is she taking the prescriptions that she needs to have after this?"

"We won't know that until we find her, Clayton. But until then, there's nothing we can do—"

He held up a hand to stop her as they turned the corner to her office and he grabbed for his ringing phone. "General Abernathy's office."

"Clayton?" the voice was weak but recognizable.

"Olivia? Oh my God you sound horrible, baby, what happened?" The world screeched to a stop. He couldn't focus on anything, think of anything, except the weak voice on the other end of the line.

"Sealview…found Cam at Sealview…had to tell you…" Her voice trailed off, to be replaced a moment later by another voice. Male, unfamiliar.

"Sergeant John Munch, NYPD, Manhattan Special Victims Unit, Precinct One Six," said the voice crisply. "Liv was interviewing a perp out here at Sealview when she saw someone pass in the hall that she recognized; Asian woman, young, moved slowly. Liv demanded to be able to talk with her, and the request was granted. During the course of that interview someone over at Sealview hassled Liv, and the inmate she was talking to got up to defend her, and there was an altercation that left one guard with a sprained shoulder and Liv got tased."

"The guards tased a pregnant woman?"

" According to Liv, the inmate—Cam Arlington—got the leads out of Liv's body before she got the full charge , then put the guard who had done it on the ground before they hit her with another taser and put her out for the count. But Liv did get hit, and the muscle contractions started premature labor. We're at the hospital now trying to get it under control."

"Oh my God. Where are you?"

"Mercy."

"Tell Liv I'll be right there." Clayton hung up the phone and looked at Shana and Alex helplessly. "Liv's at Mercy. She was interviewing a perp at Sealview and she saw Cam in the hall. She asked to speak with her, and they granted the request, but there was some kind of altercation and they both got hit with tasers. The muscle contractions started premature labor for Liv and she's at Mercy right now trying to get it under control."

"Go." Shana took charge immediately. "Alex, you and Clayton take the Hummer and go to the hospital. I'll let Dash know he's in charge until you get back. Let us know what happens."

"Where is she?"

Hawk skidded to a stop in front of the man he recognized as Liv's commanding officer and a tall, thin man wearing dark glasses and iron gray hair. Sergeant Munch, he identified the man by the badge clipped to the lapel of his jacket, but his attention was on Captain Cragen.

"She's okay. She's stabilized, they stopped the contractions, they gave her something for the pain and it made her woozy so they want her to rest now. But she's safe and the baby's safe. And I want to talk to you. What the Hell was Liv doing talking to an incarcerated Army soldier? Is this one of yours?"

"I'm helping Clayton prosecute a court-martial, in which this soldier, Cam Arlington, was to testify. Someone called immigration and told them Cam was an undocumented immigrant. She was arrested last Sunday afternoon when Liv went to pick her up from the hospital after having reconstructive surgery for an old injury and we've been trying to find her ever since. ICE doesn't have real-time tracking for the people they round up." Alex gave him the facts curtly.

"Welcome to ICE. Yes we can make you disappear," John quipped, but Cragen held up a hand.

"Stow it, John. This is not the time or the place." Cragen stepped past Munch and took Clayton's arm; Clayton understood the request for a private chat and followed the shorter older man to a group of chairs off to one side.

"This is your child Olivia's carrying."

It wasn't a question, it was a statement but Clayton answered it anyway. "Yes."

"Why the hell aren't you with her?"

"I…she made it clear when we first found out she was expecting that she didn't expect me to be around much, and while I insisted that I'll support her financially, we agreed that the baby is, for all intents and purposes, hers."

Cragen folded his arms, stared at Clayton. "And have you discussed it again since that time?"

"Things have been kind of hectic, so…no, I haven't talked to her about it since."

"Ah." Cragen stepped up to Clayton. "She now has a picture of you on her desk next to her mother's. And she's become increasingly depressed about the baby not having a father."

"But…she never…" Clayton was floored.

"No, she wouldn't have said anything. Not to you. She made a promise to you, and she was determined to keep it no matter how it killed her. But this afternoon when I got here she was writhing in that bed crying that it was too soon for the baby to come, that you hadn't changed your mind yet. So I assume from that that she no longer is happy with the 'hands off' policy you two agreed on when she first found out she was pregnant. A lot can happen in a few months, minds can change. And if I keep seeing her unhappy like that I may just give some of my old Army buddies a call and see what the rules are on making a soldier take responsibility for his child."

"Cragen…Don…" Clayton took a deep breath. "When she was kidnapped by that Colombian and we spent a couple weeks as his guests, he forced me to rape Olivia. She was pumped full of drugs and she couldn't consent and it was the worst thing I could ever imagine happening to her—it was the worst thing that's ever happened to me, and I've had a long career in the military. We think the baby could have been conceived then. I was surprised when she said she still wanted it, but if I stay away from her and the baby maybe she can forget how it happened and just enjoy having a child. She loves kids and she'd be a great Mom."

"Olivia's tougher than you think. And given the way she grew up—I'm assuming you know about her mother—she would know better than you what it's like to grow up without a father. And she would want to avoid that happening, particularly if the baby's father were someone she liked and cared about. So no, she's not going to forget but at the same time I'm not sure she would want to because she does care about you deeply. She looks at your picture on her desk when she stops for a break and she smiles, and I have never seen her smile like that for anyone—" He broke off as a door behind them opened, and they all turned to see the doctor standing there.

"Is she resting?" John spoke first.

"I told her I wanted her to rest but she's fighting it, wants to see someone named 'Clayton' before she sleeps. Says he's on the way." The doctor looked past John and Alex, saw Clayton and Cragen. "Are you Clayton?'

"Yes."

"Go in. She won't sleep until I let you say hi to her, so go in, but don't be too long and don't get her excited or worked up! She's had a nasty shock to her system and the baby didn't take it well either."

Clayton walked into the room closing the door behind him as he looked at the still figure in the bed. For a moment he thought she might have gone to sleep, but then she turned her head, saw him, and smiled weakly. "Hey, Clayton."

"Sweetheart." He lost all sense of decorum and crossed the room with quick steps, then folded her into his arms in a hug. "Oh God, Liv, I nearly lost both of you!"

"No…he didn't like it but we got through okay." She patted her tummy.

He sat down in a chair beside her and laid a hand gently on the expanding bump. "Liv…what happened?"

"I was talking to a perp and I saw someone walking by in the hallway. I looked up and oh God, Clayton, it was Cam, she's at Sealview. They apparently rent cell space to ICE for holding deportation detainees, so I flashed my badge and demanded to be able to talk to her, and they let me talk to her. She looks exhausted, so tired, and she said she hadn't been given pain meds for her surgery or any of her prescriptions. She said she didn't know why she was detained, she never knew anything was wrong. Whenever she has an official form to fill out she checks her ethnicity as Asian and Native American, and that's usually sufficient. It's never come up until now, so she has no idea why. I told her not to worry, we're working on it and we'll get her out, and I gave her a hug because she just looks so stressed. With her past, being locked in a cell now has to be incredibly hard on her CPTSD, and she's a wreck right now.

"A guard stepped forward and told me I couldn't have physical contact with her, told me to sit down and he grabbed Cam and shoved her back into her chair. She couldn't move fast enough to catch herself in time, and fell, and I went to help her. The guard raised his baton to hit me and Cam yelled at him, told him to stop, couldn't he see I was pregnant. He hit her, and I yelled at him because she hadn't done anything wrong. At this point another guard ran in, and he had a taser, and he aimed it at me. It hurt, and I couldn't stay upright and I fell, but somehow Cam got to me and grabbed the lead and yanked it out of me. That was when the first guard hit her with another taser, then they both tased her at once while a third guard grabbed me and hustled me out. John was waiting outside because the perp I talked to would talk to me but not to John, and John called the ambulance."

"Are you okay?"

She shuddered weakly. "The electricity caused my muscles to spasm and the doctor says I went into premature labor. They gave me something to stop it, and they kept a monitor on August the whole time and he got a little jumpy but he's okay, and then they said they wanted me to sleep but I couldn't until I saw you." And, softer. "Clayton…thank you for coming."

"Did you think I wouldn't?" he asked her quietly.

"I…I didn't know…I mean, you're pretty insistent about a hands-off policy…"

"Sweetheart, as soon as I saw that sonogram picture on your dresser I had second thoughts. And third thoughts. And fourth thoughts. I've been thinking about it but the time just wasn't right to talk about it with you, and I didn't want to go back on my promise to you like practically every other male in your life has. I was going to hold to that promise, even if it killed me, if that was what you wanted."

"Well…I don't want it." She looked at him pleadingly. "I want August to have a father."

"And I want him to have a Mom. All right, baby, let's talk about this later. You go ahead and get some sleep and I'm going to go see what I can do about getting Cam out."

"She needs medical attention, Clayton—they hit her with two tasers at once and she was screaming-I could hear her screaming as they dragged me out but I was in so much pain I couldn't respond right away…get her out. Please. She's in there with murderers and arsonists and she doesn't belong in there!"

"All right. All right. I'll get her out, Liv, I promise. Don't get upset or the doctor will kick me out, okay? Ssh." He stroked a lock of sweaty hair off her forehead. "Go ahead and get some sleep, and I'll see you when you wake up." She closed her eyes, and he waited for her breathing to even out before he left the room.

Alex, John, and Cragen were sitting on chairs in the hall, talking; they all looked up as she walked out. "She's sleeping, finally," he said wearily. "Detective Munch, thank you for calling me." John Munch just nodded simply.

"I updated Don and John about what's been going on. About Cam and what's been happening with the court martial…John already kind of knew some of it…Cam's childhood case was his, after all. Liv had already told him she'd found Cam."

"I'm going to go get her out," Clayton said grimly. "She doesn't belong in prison with murderers and arsonists and rapists and child molesters. She hasn't done anything wrong, so she shouldn't be treated like one."

"I'm going to stay in the city. I want to look up an immigration lawyer I know and see what he can think of to do. There has to be a loophole in the law somewhere. I'll see you back at base this evening." Alex rose from her chair and headed for the elevator.

"Hey," Don called as Hawk started to walk away down the hall. "Let us know if you need anything, okay? From what Liv said your soldier doesn't belong there and anything we can do we will."

"Thank you," Clayton said, and he headed for the parking lot and the Hummer.


	3. Chapter 45: Sealview

**Chapter 45: Sealview**

"You can't see her."

Hawk counted to ten, slowly, then backward again to one. It helped. He didn't want to lose his temper here, in front of the prison warden; it probably wouldn't go over well. "I understand she's been picked up by ICE/DHS for being illegal. I understand she has no rights. I understand the usual process is to have her fill out a form for a visitor and then wait to have it approved. But as a legal US citizen I have a right to see my employee."

"You don't understand. You can't see her. She's been sentenced to ten days in solitary."

It took a moment for that to sink in. "What do you mean, solitary? As in 'solitary confinement'? Why? She hasn't done anything wrong, she shouldn't even be here in the first place!"

"She attacked one of the guards, put him on the floor with a sprained shoulder. Given the tactics she used, it was decided to confine her to solitary as she is a risk to our personnel's safety."

"Your personnel's safety would not have even been an issue if you hadn't attacked an unarmed pregnant woman with a baton and a taser! A cop, no less! You could have killed her baby!"

"The inmate could have called for help. She did not have to take action herself."

He lost it. "Cameron Arlington is not one of those who would wait for help to come. She has not been trained that way. She is a highly-trained support member for the US Army's elite Rangers. Sitting and waiting for someone else to help is not what she has been trained to do. Added to that, the pregnant cop your guard assaulted is her friend. Don't tell me you would stand by and watch as your best friend was beaten up and tased!"

The warden shrugged, unfazed. "Doesn't matter what I'd do. Doesn't matter how good you say she is, she's here and she has to abide by the rules. She will stay in solitary for the next ten days as a punitive action for her disruptive and dangerous behavior. If she continues to prove dangerous to herself and those around her she will remain in solitary."

"You can't do that. You can't keep her in there that long. A day, maybe. Two. No longer." He remembered what Scarlett said about Cam being too isolated, too alone. Good God, what would a stint in solitary confinement do to her? "She was a victim of severe childhood abuse and she has CPTSD—Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—as a result; putting her in solitary would exacerbate her mental health issues unnecessarily. She is not a danger to herself or anyone else. No one would have gotten hurt if your officer hadn't attacked her pregnant friend! She's an Army Ranger, she's trained to react and protect!"

The warden leaned forward and pressed a button on his phone. "Guard Henderson, please report to warden's office."

Barely seconds later the door opened and a guard stepped inside. The warden addressed him directly. "Henderson. This man says he's General Abernathy, US Army. He claims that one of our inmates here, 24631, is an Army Ranger being wrongfully detained until her citizenship status is sorted out. Now, I understand she was involved in the altercation yesterday, when Grimauld was attacked?"

"Yes, Sir."

"And you were present."

"Yes Sir."

"Taking into account that she is an enlisted member of the US Army, an Army Ranger—General Abernathy here says it like it means something—and he also informs me that she is suffering from CPTSD, does she or does she not present a danger to the guard staff if allowed to remain in general population?"

The man looked visibly shaken. "Sir. She's an Army Ranger?"

Hawk answered him. "Yes. Still in training, but she's one of the most capable trainees I have met in a long time."

"And she suffers from PTSD?"

"As a child she was subjected to long-term severe abuse." He wasn't going to tell these guards what kind of abuse—they didn't need to know that.

Henderson turned to the warden. "Sir. Request permission to place the inmate in full restraints, The CPTSD coupled with her abilities as a trained US Army Ranger add up to someone who is quite capable of killing if she has to and is also rendered unpredictable enough by her mental illness to lash out unexpectedly. With devastating consequences for everyone."

"She doesn't need full restraints! She's not a danger to anyone!"

Henderson interjected, "Respectfully, sir, I disagree. She assaulted Grimauld and put him on the floor, spraining his shoulder in the process and the only reason she did not attack anyone else was because we got to her with a taser first. She is a maximum security risk."

The warden pondered a minute, looking from Hawk to Henderson, then finally nodded to the guard. "Do it."

"No! This is cruel and unusual punishment!" Hawk was furious.

"General Abernathy. We will do no more than is necessary to restrain her for her own safety and that of others. Look. I will pull up the camera on her cell and you may watch the entire process, all right?" he turned the monitor on his desk around and typed a code. "Henderson. Go ahead."

Barely three minutes later Hawk saw Henderson arrive at the door of a cell marked A 374. Unlike most regular prison cells this one had a heavy steel door with a small hatch down at the bottom, presumably for meal trays to be slid into the inmate. As the door opened he saw the absolute darkness in side and thought _oh Jesus, Cam, God, I'm so sorry…_

The camera zoomed in, and now he could see Cam lying curled in a fetal position on the floor, her muscles so tight his hurt in response. Her face was damp with tears, her eyes glazed and unseeing, and he felt his heart stop. "Please tell them to take it easy, she's having a flashback, I've seen her like that before! She can't hear or see anyone or anything when she's like that!"

But it was too late. One of the guards had already barked an order; he couldn't hear it, there was no sound, but he knew it would have been something like 'stand up'. And Cam refused to move; she was locked in her memory, a hallucination-type flashback, and the world outside didn't exist for her, not right now. He wondered where she was in her mind; in the basement? locked down, her world dark after they'd turned off the lights and left her alone in the dark to recover from whatever they'd done to her so they could do it all again tomorrow? Vivid in his mind was the memory of the picture Olivia had showed him, the photo of Cam some pedophile had taken; bleeding, battered, screaming, a cigarette become a torture instrument for a vulnerable child…They barked the order again and still she refused to stand.

They didn't bother to order her again.

Hands grabbed her arms, hauled her upright. She screamed now, lost in her flashback, haunted by memories, and fought the hands that held her, hands that in her flashback she probably thought belonged to those who were coming to hurt her. Hawk cried out, heartsick, as on the monitor she lashed out at the hands around her. Her eyes were squeezed shut, tears streaming down her face, and her lips were moving; one word, repeated over and over. _Please…please, please please…_

"Stop it! Call them off!" he turned to the warden. "She was severely abused as a child, restrained for days at a time and the only contact she had was with those who hurt her! She can't help the way she's acting. You have to stop! Please! Just let her calm down!"

The warden simply stared at the screen, unmoving, and Clayton saw with a shock of horror that two more guards were bringing a padded table with outstretched arms, bristling with straps. "No!" He screamed in helpless fury and frustration, but his words went unheeded as the guards wrestled Cam over to the table, dragged her up on it, and strapped her down tightly, stretching her arms outward and buckling restraints down firmly over her wrist, elbow and upper arm. Cam had lost all sense of where she was, who she was, and what was happening to her; she thrashed, screaming now, begging them to not hurt her.

They strapped her down so tightly to the bed that she couldn't move, then pushed the bed back into the solitary confinement cell and closed the door. As the warden turned off the monitor he came face to face with a General Hawk so far gone in rage that even he took an involuntary step back.

"What you have just done goes so far beyond decency I can't even describe it." He snarled. "I will be back with orders for her release and once she is out of here I will bury you in so many lawsuits your kids will still be dealing with them when you're dead and gone."

The warden's voice shook but he maintained his composure. "She is an illegal immigrant. She doesn't have rights. She's also mentally ill and unfortunately our focus has to be on preserving our personnel, not pandering to her indisposition. What we just did is the safest alternative for everyone, even her—if we didn't restrain her she could hurt herself."

"The restraints WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN NECESSARY IF YOU'D LET HER CALM DOWN!" Hawk exploded. "These aren't civil rights for legal or illegal immigrants we're talking about, these are human rights, rights that everyone has! Nothing I just saw even comes close to common human decency, compassion and kindness! I will be back for her and I swear to you I will bring you down for what I just saw!" He grabbed the doorknob, yanked it open so hard the door slammed into the wall. "Don't bother sending a guard. I can find my own way out."

Anger got him out the door and out to the parking lot. Rage made him floor the pedal and peel out of the gate and onto the road. Fury blinded him as he drove back to the city, but started to cool as he sat in traffic over the Brooklyn Bridge. By the time he pulled back into a parking space at the hospital all of his useful emotions were tapped out, and he just felt drained and exhausted. _Cam, oh God, I'm so sorry. You never wanted to testify. If I hadn't forced you to do this they wouldn't have called Immigration on you and what I just saw wouldn't have happened. _

He sat down heavily in a chair next to Liv's bed. At the sound she stirred slightly, woke. "Clayton," she said, and her sleepy smile thawed his heart. He leaned over her bed and gave her a gentle, lingering kiss, which she returned with interest.

"Did you get Cam?' she asked him when their lungs finally reminded them that breathing wasn't optional.

He linked his hands with her, lacing their fingers together. Her grip was warm and firm and somehow comforting, and while he was tempted to lie to her, deep inside he knew he'd tell her the truth. "I tried. I wanted to, so much, oh Liv, you have no idea…"and in a torrent of words the story of the afternoon came out. He hadn't meant to burden her with the image of the brutality he'd witnessed, but he simply couldn't keep it to himself, and by the time he was done he could see Liv felt the same anguish he felt. "How can they do this to someone who didn't do anything wrong? She's already endured more than her fair share of pain and abuse for one lifetime, how can they just…victimize her like this again? This immigration system is so screwed up."

"Yes, it is," Olivia said quietly. "A few years back we got a case, this little girl named Maria Recinos. She was smuggled into the US supposedly to join her American dad in Las Vegas, but instead of taking her there the smuggling ring sold her to a pedophile and she spent a couple years as his captive. She finally stole his cellphone one day, called the police…I spoke with her. The guy who had her had all sorts of gadgets on his phone to keep us from finding out who he was but we figured it out eventually and we got her back. You know, I figured it would be simple, her mother was waiting in her home country for her. Her father was in the US, so she could either be sent back to her mother or she could choose to go to her Dad as was originally intended. But ICE detained her, sent her to a detainee camp for unaccompanied minors while they asked Dad to prove he was legal, and it was like kiddie prison. She wore an orange jumpsuit and it took almost a year of red tape just to get her a child immigration lawyer. You think the laws are harsh for adults like Cam, imagine being a child and because you're illegal Child Protective Services can't even help you."

"I can't imagine." Clayton said honestly; his mind was still full of the images of Cam being strapped down and screaming. "I can't believe this is the same country that I spent my entire adult career fighting for. It's supposed to be a free country and we're supposed to be fair and just. How can we say that when stuff like this happens to people like Cam?" He laid his forehead against Olivia's arm, fighting the exhausted sorrow. "Jesus. She was begging and pleading for them to leave her alone and they just victimized her all over again, strapping her down."

"It's not fair," Olivia said quietly, running her fingers through his hair. "But at the moment you're exhausted and there's nothing you can do about it, okay?"

"Okay." He was tired, and he scooted the chair up and laid his head on the pillow next to hers. "Hey. You called him August?"

"Yes. I decided I like the name."

"Benson or Abernathy?"

She laughed. "I still can't make up my mind. It would be easier to teach a kindergartner to write 'Benson'—there are fewer letters—but I guess I really hadn't thought about it because I wanted to ask you but I didn't know how to bring the subject up. And you have to admit that it's been a bit hectic, with the SERE training and then the court-martial. I've been seeing more of Ettienne when he comes to see Alex than I have of you."

Guilt ate at him. "I'm sorry—"

A finger on his lips. "Don't be. I knew that was what I was in for when I fell in love with you. You're a busy man with a busy schedule and so am I and those schedules didn't really mesh well." She sighed. "Of course, now that I have all this free time my schedule's considerably clearer."

"Free time?"

"Yes. The doctor here put me on bed rest for the remainder of my pregnancy and Don pushed through my maternity leave papers early."

"So no work?"

"Well, I'm still going to be helping Munch and some of the new detectives with paperwork and stuff, and I'll finish up the cases I currently have, but yeah, for all intents and purposes, I'm done until the baby's born."

"What's Elliot think?"

Hesitation. "Elliot took early retirement after IAB investigated him for a shooting and I haven't really seen a lot of him since."

"Oh. Liv." No wonder she'd been looking worn and stressed lately, and he'd been too busy to pay attention. "I'm sorry, sweetie."

"It's okay." She was sounding a little sleepy. "We had a great working partnership at first, but after Kathy left him his issues started to strain our work relationship. I was happy when she came back and they had Eli but it didn't help his attitude any and the stress was starting to wear on him. At least now that he doesn't have the job anymore he can focus on his marriage and Kathy and the kids."

"Okay, Liv. You sound sleepy…why don't you get some sleep and I'll come see you tomorrow?"

"Okay. I'll be at home, though; Alex stayed in the city tonight to consult with an immigration lawyer she knows. I called her, she said she'll come out with the Mustang and pick me up tomorrow and take me home, then have Ettienne come out and pick her up and take her back to base to work on getting Cam back for the court martial."

"No. Call _me_ and I'll come pick you up." He winced at the possessiveness in his voice, but she just smiled and kissed him.

"All right. I'll call you. Thanks, Clayton."


	4. Chapter 46: Eleven Acres

**Chapter 46: Eleven Acres**

"All right. Her name is Cameron Arlington, and she's currently being held at Sealview Women's Correctional Facility. Give me a moment to try and find that file."

Clayton drummed his fingers on his desktop as he waited for the woman's voice to come back on the line. Same one from before; he figured that would be a good thing, as this woman had already heard from him before and at least he was slightly familiar with her.

"Does she have any other names?"

"Not that I know of—wait. Her birth certificate was issued for the name Ok Suk Park."

"All right. I found her file. Please remember if you need to call us in the future she is listed under Park, Ok Suk. That is the name she will use while detained and the name she is registered under."

"Her name is Cameron Arlington."

"Mr. Abernathy. She says her name is Cameron Arlington but her birth certificate has no such name on it. There is no paper here legally changing her name or proving her status as the lawfully adopted child of her father. She will need the adoption paper that says she was adopted and the paper that legally changed her name."

"She is the biological child of her father. She's half Native American, for God's sake, you can tell that just by looking at her! He shouldn't have needed to adopt her! I'm trying to track down her father's service record now hoping the paperwork he filed for her immigration and naturalization from overseas is in there, but it's taking time."

"If her father's name is not on the birth certificate then she needs to produce a paper that legalizes her adoption. If she wishes to use the name Cameron Arlington she needs to produce a paper in which it was legally changed. According to the prison notes, she is employing passive-aggressive resistance tactics by refusing to answer to the name 'Sue Park' and her time in solitary confinement has been lengthened to attempt to break her of that."

"Jesus…" Clayton cursed. "Wait a minute. This whole time in prison you've been using her birth name instead of her name? No wonder she didn't respond when they gave her orders when she had her flashback!" He leaned forward. "You cannot keep her in solitary confinement. Please. She was subjected to severe childhood abuse and now suffers from complex post traumatic stress disorder, and when I was at the prison I saw them strap her down to a table when she had her flashback instead of giving her time to calm down and come out of it. The physical restraint intensified her flashback and they were unwilling to give her time to 'come back' to the present. Solitary confinement will not help her recover emotionally from her CPTSD, and will instead exacerbate her condition. As well, she had just come out of surgery and needs medications, pain prescriptions and antibiotics to help her recover from that surgery. We have those medications here and I can drop them off at the prison if you need them."

"That will not be necessary. The prison pharmacy will no doubt have the medicines required and will be dispensed as the doctor feels necessary."

_Yeah. I'll bet they aren't going to feel it 'necessary' although they'll give her some downers to keep her calm._ He forced that thought out of his mind. "If her father never thought it necessary to fill out adoption papers for his own child, how do we prove she's his?"

Alex leaned forward so her voice could be heard over the phone. "Since her father was Iroquois, could we get a DNA test from someone in her clan or her tribe and then run hers against it? There are certain ethnic markers that crop up in DNA tests that could positively identify her as a member of the Iroquois tribe and would therefore prove she is indubitably 'legal'.

"We've never used DNA tests before." The voice sounded doubtful. "I don't know if that would be allowed."

"Cam also said she was adopted by the Iroquois tribe. Would those tribe-issued papers be proof that she is here legally?"

The voice spoke immediately. "Papers issued by Native American tribes are not officially recognized by the US Government and Customs and Immigration officials as they are not a separate sovereign entity from the US government. So no."

_They were here before we were. They should be automatically protected._ Clayton didn't voice that thought, opting instead for a neutral, "All right. I think I understand what she needs now. Please check with ICE and find out if a DNA match would be admissible as proof of her heritage and we will work on those official papers." He severed the connection and looked at his team wearily. "Anyone have any ideas on where to go from here?"

Alex was gathering up her papers. "I'm going to fill out a DNA request form and go to Sealview. They'll have to take her out of solitary to take a DNA swab and I'll have to be present when they do it, so she'll see me and I can tell her that we're working on it and to hang on. At least she'll know we haven't totally forgotten her."

"I'm trying to get Cam's father's service record, but it's slow going because we're Army and he was Air Force and there is a lot of red tape my request has to go through. I'll keep trying because I kind of get the feeling that's where we're going to find the required documentation." Allie looked just as tired as he felt.

Shana said unexpectedly, "I think you should go upstate. Cam has her home address listed on her enlistment papers as Cattaraugus County Reservation, and didn't she mention several times that as a warrior of her tribe she's entitled to hold property? There could be clues to her past there, maybe a forgotten paper somewhere."

Clayton looked at her in astonishment. "I never thought of that. That might work. I can also talk to some of the Iroquois there too."

"Take Charlie with you. They'll be more willing to open up to another Native American than they will to a 'stupid white man'." Shana looked amused. "And hey, if Liv's up to it, take her with you—she can pave the way though the local law enforcement office."

Clayton couldn't find Charlie Ironknife anywhere. He checked the rec room, quarters, garage bay, didn't find the man. It wasn't until he passed the gym and heard the unmistakable sound of flute music that he pinned the big Navajo down in the 'girlz only' studio.

He paused in the doorway, unwilling to disturb what looked like a private ritual. Charlie was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor dressed in full shaman regalia, a small burning candle sitting on a polished circular wooden dish in front of him, there was an incense burner close to his right knee and he was playing a soft melody on the tiny cedar flute he held. On the other side of the candle lay another flute. Cam's, Hawk guessed.

Charlie stopped playing, let the last few soft notes drift into silence before reaching over and blowing out the candle. "Yes, Clayton?"

"Sorry to disturb you," he said quietly as he stepped fully into the studio. Shana, Courtney and Allie hadn't used the studio since Cam had been attacked; the mirrors had been replaced, the floor cleaned, but Hawk could, in his mind's eye, still see the smears of blood on the floor and he suspected that was the real reason the girls hadn't used it since.

"Her spirit is strong here," Charlie said by way of explanation. "She was happiest here when she was dancing; there is a part of her soul that still lingers. I sing to her, and I pray that she will hear it, and that it brings her back."

"Charlie, we will get this resolved and we will get her back," Clayton picked up Cam's flute and examined it. It looked the same as the first one, but there was more detail, the lines finer, the deer's limbs more sharply defined. Now he understood the significance of the flames carved around the flute's holes; the fire that had disfigured Cam's body so horribly but had set her free, the freedom she had paid such a dear price for.

"I am not talking about her immigration issues, Clayton. I know you will resolve those and she will come back to base. She is in a dark place right now, she is lost and looking for help and there is no one there to help lead her back. So I play for her, hoping she will hear and it will help her find her way back to her body."

"She's lost?"

"She is having what Shana and Allie called a flashback. My people call it wandering the memory's road, so I have been keeping vigil here. Blood is the memory's river, and if she can find the river she can find her way back. She is the Deer-Who-Leads, the north star, she needs only a little help to find her way back. She is tied and hurting and unable to move, but I promised her that if she comes back we will make it all right. I will make it all right."

"Charlie…how did you know…I haven't told anyone except the girls that she's on a restraint table in solitary."

"Blood is the memory's river, Clayton. She can hear me just as I can hear her. I can hear her crying, I know she is in pain and the infection in her body is spreading, but when I play I can soothe her, give her heart to fight and keep fighting until she is safe."

"She's infected?"

"The surgery went well and restored harmony to her body but I can see darkness and I know she's infected."

It didn't even occur to Clayton to doubt Charlie's word. He grabbed his cellphone, fumbled with it until he got Alex's phone number dialed.

She answered on the first ring. "Clayton?"

"Charlie says she's infected and she's in a lot of pain. When you're there getting the DNA swab, please see if you can get them to give her some pain meds and her antibiotics!"

"She'll get them. If I have to file a lawsuit against the prison right there she'll get them." Alex didn't even ask how he knew, although Clayton knew she'd probably bombard him with questions later.

"Thanks Alex." He stuffed his cellphone into his pocket and said, "Charlie…you up to a trip upstate with me? And Olivia?"

Charlie uncoiled from the floor with smooth grace. "Where are we going?"

"I'm going to dig into Cam's past. She said she's a property holder with her tribe, so we want to go upstate and take a look at her house, and speak to some of the people of her clan. Maybe they will know something we don't."

"And you hope that if you have another Native American around, even a different nation, they may be willing to open up to you."

Clayton rolled his eyes. "Am I that transparent?" he held up a hand. "Don't answer that. If it makes you feel any better, Olivia will be coming along and she's going to smooth things over with local law enforcement while I check out Cam's aunt and uncle."

"It is a wise man who knows when he needs help," Charlie said sagely, and it was only as Clayton looked up at him that he realized Charlie was laughing at him.

Olivia took a deep sniff of the air as Clayton opened the door and helped her out. "Wow. It smells different up here, so much fresher and cleaner than New York."

"None of the pollution in the city, the rotting garbage and the smell of too many humans living too close together." Charlie defined the thought for her. "I can see why Cameron loves it up here. It is absolutely gorgeous." It was early October, and the air had a crisp bite to it; a hint of winter to come even as the panorama of surrounding trees on their right turned red, brown and gold around the small town of Irving. Off to their left, Lake Erie sat serene, a smooth unruffled surface reflecting the cloudless blue arched vault of sky overhead.

The reservation community of Eleven Acres was tiny. Absolutely tiny. You could have fit the entire population of Joe Base here and still have had space left over. Clayton had pulled up in front of the general store, which looked like something from out of a wild west painting; small, rustic, wood-framed, complete with a couple of battered wooden chairs leaning on their back legs against the front wall under the capacious porch. The only thing it was missing was a couple of guys sitting in those chairs chewing on grass stems, he thought.

He'd worn his fatigues, though he'd taken rank indicators off his sleeve; he didn't want to scare away anyone who could have valuable information to help them sort this mess out and bring Cam back home. He commended himself on that move as the three of them walked into the general store; Olivia wore some comfortable loose pants and an oversized NYPD sweatshirt, and Charlie was dressed like a typical 'modern' native American; button down flannel shirt, jeans, boots, his long hair twisted into two braids and several strands of turquoise and wooden carved beads around his neck.

There were four people in the store, loading up on items from the shelves, and one guy behind the counter, plainly the store owner or cashier; all of them looked up and went absolutely silent as Clayton, Liv, and Charlie walked in.

"Hey, soldier," the man behind the counter spoke first. "What brings you to our neck of the woods?"

"Hi. Clayton Abernathy, US Army. Uh, I'm looking for anyone who can give me information about a half-Iroquois woman named Cameron Arlington."

"What do you want to know?" the storekeeper challenged.

"She is one of my soldiers, on base, and she's been detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement for being here illegally. There is some paperwork she has to provide before she can be released and I'm trying to track that paperwork down so I can bring her home."

"ICE has no jurisdiction over the members of the tribe," said a woman sharply, coming around the end of a rack of shelves, and her features proclaimed her heritage. "There is no reason she should have been detained."

"According to them, since Cam's father wasn't listed on her birth certificate it was his responsibility to formally adopt her. The paperwork they have on her has no indication of adoption or of her name change; she knows herself as Cameron Arlington but the only name that ICE has for her is Sue Park. They are refusing to use 'Cameron Arlington' until they have some sort of official paper that legally changes her name. I was hoping that I might find something here, some clue that would lead me to the location of that paper so I can bring her home."

"_This_ is her home. We told her that the white man's world was not for her, that she should not go back out into it after what it had done to her. But she refused to listen and went back out anyway." The woman's eyes were hard and full of anger, not at Cam, but at Clayton. He understood, and he didn't take it personally; he was a symbol of the 'white man's world' that she had warned Cam against.

"To hide and run is not the warrior's way," Charlie rumbled unexpectedly from behind Clayton. "Sometimes the Deer-Who-Leads must be willing to turn and fight the wolves that nip at her heels. Freedom from the wolves, both inside and out, is the only way to achieve true balance as a warrior of the People."

The woman blinked in astonishment as Clayton stepped aside, allowing Charlie to step forward. She took in his dress, his stiffly formal manner, and said hesitantly, "You are not one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois."

"I am Navajo, from Taos Pueblo, New Mexico. Kenastie Scannado is—" He used a word Clayton didn't know, but at the sound of it the woman's face softened.

"Then be welcome. I am Jennifer Aiennatha, of the Oneida tribe of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, Bear Clan. Though not of my clan, Kenastie Scannado was a dear friend and sister and if I can help get her back, I will." She hefted her shopping basket, which seemed heavy; Clayton stepped forward almost unthinkingly and took it from her. She smiled then, and allowed him to carry it to the counter for her. "Let me pay for this, and we will go to my house and talk."


	5. Chapter 47: Haudenosaunee

**Chapter 47: Haudenosaunee**

Given that the woman had said she was a medicine woman, Clayton expected to see a traditional lodge built in the traditional way. What he saw instead was a neat little two-story farmhouse with white siding and dark green shutters, looking like any typical small single-family residence in any rural setting.

She looked at him with amusement in her eyes. "We're not that far behind the times. We do cling to some traditional ways but we have stepped into the modern world." She stepped into the front door of her house. "Come in. No, the door is not locked; there is no need up here; none of the People would dare harm the belongings of a medicine woman, and our braves patrol the borders of our reservation to catch interlopers; that was how they found Cameron seven years ago. If she had not been so young and so badly wounded they would have turned her away from the border, but Michael—the name of the brave who found her—realized she needed immediate attention and brought her here."

The inside of the house was neat and clean, and here you could tell the house belonged to one of the People. The hide tunic stretched on a sewing frame in front of the hearth with a tray of beads on a low table beside it was a giveaway; as was the handcrafted wooden farmhouse table with woven willow-branch seat. The walls were hung with bunches of drying plants; herbs and flowers, Clayton guessed. _So that's how Cam acquired the knowledge of plants and stuff she used in SERE training_.

"Please have a seat. Miss, that baby is awfully restless, isn't he?"

"Olivia. Please. And yes, he's a little feisty today." Liv's hand rubbed a soothing circle around the top of her stomach.

"I'll have something to settle him in a little bit." She put a kettle of water on the stove, then turned to Clayton and Charlie. "Coffee?"

"Please," Clayton said with relief, then paused. "Um…while Cam and I were out in the North Carolina woods she introduced us to some kind of herbal coffee substitute. Would you happen to have any of that? I kind of got a taste for it in the week we were out there."

Jennifer laughed as she opened the cupboard and got out a jar of some sort of crumbled dried herb. "I believe the proper term for it is going native. Yes, I can make you a cup."

"Now you have me curious and I want to try it," Olivia chuckled.

Jennifer looked at her. "It wouldn't be good for the baby," she said. "Do you normally drink coffee? A lot of it?"

"Um, yeah, I'm a New York City cop, so coffee's practically a food group for us," Olivia admitted.

"You should not drink so much. Particularly while pregnant. It is part of the reason why your baby is so restless." Jennifer busied herself with taking packets of herbs and other materials out of various cupboards and jars as the kettle started to whistle cheerfully.

In no time at all she was placing a steaming mug of something that smelled faintly flowery. Olivia took a sip, raised her eyebrows. "This is good."

"Mint to give you a little energy, lemon verbena to calm any nausea, chamomile to soothe the baby, some wild honey to sweeten it. If you drink it while it's warm, the baby feels the temperature difference in your stomach and will try to snuggle closer to the source of the heat, taking some of the weight off your pelvic floor and relieving some of the cramps and pressure. It'll probably take a couple of cups, so when you're done with that one let me make you another one." Olivia nodded and settled back in her chair. "So you're a New York City cop?"

"Yes."

"Did you know Cam when she lived in New York?"

"No, I didn't. But one of my coworkers, John…when we got a call from Cam's school saying that the teacher thought here was abuse, John supervised her removal from her aunt and uncle into Child Protective Services. She refused to talk to him, just kept saying everything was fine, and he didn't have choice but to let her go back to her Aunt and Uncle's. Then they moved out of the city, and about eight months after they'd moved we ran across a picture a pedophile had of Cam…being hurt…and John blamed himself for not doing more, not trying harder to get her to talk to him, not finding a way to keep her from having to go back to her aunt and uncle."

"He did do everything he could, right?'

"Yes, there's only so much we can do if the child doesn't want to talk. It doesn't make us feel any better after we see the kind of harm that's inflicted. And Cam…I haven't told John about her CPTSD and her flashbacks. He would blame himself more."

"Has Cam talked to you about what she went through?"

"She told us her Aunt and Uncle locked her in the basement and brought people in to hurt her and take pictures. She told us at the time she set fire to their house she didn't want to live anymore, she wasn't looking to escape, she just wanted to keep her aunt and uncle from hurting anyone else."

"One of our braves, Justin Talldeer, was out in the woods hunting and watching the reservation's borders when he saw a body lying in the stream that cuts through the middle of our reservation. At first he thought some hiker had gotten lost, then when he saw the body was not moving he thought someone had killed a person and planted the body on our reservation to blame us. But when he got there he saw the burned flesh, smelled the charred skin, and he was sure she must be dead, but when he got to her and turned her over he realized she was still alive. She said 'Papa help me' and she passed out.

"They brought her to me. I knew immediately that I was not qualified to help her, that only a miracle at a white man's hospital would save her. I did what I could; I made poultices and placed them on her burned skin, dressings and bandages—I was hoping just to make her comfortable enough to move to a white man's hospital. I called Andrew—the shopkeeper you met—and asked him to bring his truck around so we could lay her in the bed and drive her to the nearest hospital, but as I was wrapping her in blankets and pulling a spare mattress into the bed of the truck she woke.

"She started to scream, she was in so much pain, but she begged us not to send her to a hospital, begged us not to tell anyone she was here. We thought at that point she might have committed a crime and been burned by the result of it, but even as we prepared to load her into the truck against her wishes she got out—I don't know how she did it—she got up and started to stagger away. She was half-blind from the fire and from pain, every move hurt her and she cried with every step, but she was determined to move, determined to get away, and when she turned around to limp into the treeline I saw her back. Most of the skin had burned, but some of it hadn't, not all the way, and I saw large cuts, gashes, that had been opened before the fire and had been cauterized by the flames. We Iroquois are no stranger to wounds, and we learned the lessons the white man taught us; we knew what someone who had been tortured looked like, and she had been a victim of someone terrible. Looking at what she looked like, coupled with her absolute desperation to escape us even if it meant she died in the process, made me decide to keep her with us instead of taking her to the hospital in Gowanda.

"I look back now and the three months she spent here with me are the longest of my life. I got the children to go foraging for the herbs I needed; I didn't dare leave her alone for a minute. There were nights when she stopped breathing, and I performed CPR to restart her lungs; days when she just lay and cried with the pain, ceaselessly, all day long. Several times when I left her to sleep, to shower, to eat, she woke up and tried to kill herself. I didn't blame her; she was in so much pain that I prayed to the Goddess to take her in her sleep and spare her, but I didn't want her to take her own life. If it was the Goddess's will that she die I would accept it but I could not let her take her own life.

"But gradually it did get better. She started to spend more time sleeping and less time crying in pain, then her lucid, awake periods grew longer. She was still delirious with pain for long periods of time, but her words started to make sense. When she was delirious at first I couldn't make sense of what she was saying because her speech was slurred, her lungs and throat badly burned by smoke and fire. But as she started to heal I started to recognize words, and they were words in Iroquois. I had already begun to suspect she was one of the People because while her features looked like an outlander's her skin coloring and something of the way she moved told me otherwise.

"You do know her father was one of the People?" Clayton, Liv and Charlie nodded. "When she was delirious she would speak to him as if he were there. Through these one-sided conversations I learned that her father had raised her overseas on a military base somewhere, that even though it was unfamiliar territory he did his best to teach her the ways of his people. He would take her camping in the woods without all of the modern fancy gear, teach her to hunt, track, kill, prepare and eat game she caught herself, taught her to make bows and arrows, flint knives and other weapons, taught her how to evade, track, and observe. Most girls would have been horrified—I have two girls of my own, they now live in the white man's cities with white man's jobs—my husband was one of the People and he attempted to teach our girls the ways of the People, but they did not want to learn. But Cam told me, when she was well enough to sit up in bed and talk, that for her the lessons were fun, that she wanted to learn and was proud of her accomplishments and her abilities. She truly is a daughter of the tribe, no matter where the other half of her heritage came from.

"As she recovered I grew more and more curious about where she had come from. It wasn't until she had been with us for a month that Andrew brought back a copy of a newspaper from the library in Gowanda. There had been an Asian couple living in an isolated mountain cabin close to our reservation's borders who had been killed in a house fire; the cabin had burned to the ground and they had died. The authorities investigated, but finally said that the fire had been caused by carelessness, that there had been an open gas can and the fumes ignited, and they were asleep in their beds and never knew. They were burned almost beyond recognition.

"Andrew's wife came to sit with Cam and I told Cam I was going herb gathering. What I did was take a team of braves with me, and Andrew and I took a trip to where the newspaper article had said that the Asian couple had their cabin. There was a lot of rubble, or burned timbers, beams; the newspaper article had said that the couple lived alone and were rather reclusive so the investigators simply moved enough of the rubble to get the bodies out and left the rest alone.

"We sifted through the rubble, moved garbage and broken furniture out of the way. There wasn't much left that wasn't burned; but we found a charred trunk with papers inside that had not been burned. They were written in a language we did not understand, but we didn't know if it was important so we pulled it out, put it on the truck, and moved on.

"We were at ground level when we saw the door. A charred wooden trapdoor, with a small opening like a handle, in the side of it. It was larger than we expected at first, and we cleared a lot of rubble to get it free to open it. Once we did we saw a wooden ladder leading downward. So we went down.

"I don't know how to describe to you what we saw. A concrete room, bare of anything except a metal-framed bed bolted down to that concrete floor. There were a few thin blankets on that bed, with holes; the mattress itself was stained and dirty and filthy, and there were what we considered to be bloodstains on it.

"There were straps on that bed, heavy leather straps that looked too thick and heavy to have been wrapped around her arms and ankles—I had already seen sores on her arms where straps had rubbed so I knew what they were for. I saw a closet door, off to one side, and when I opened it and looked in I saw a hole in the floor with a sort of seat around it, and a shower head sticking out of the wall. That was her bathroom.

"The second closet door was locked, but we cut the knob out of the wood and got it open. And I saw…I saw whips and all kinds of torture instruments… just all kinds of things like that. The braves just stared—we'd never seen anything like it before, never even dreamed that some of these things existed, and I remember Andrew saying, 'no wonder she would rather have died than come back here'."

Clayton was frozen; Liv's eyes glittered with tears. Charlie sat silently, grimly, his eyes narrowed in anger, as Jennifer continued softly. "I stopped asking her after that if she wanted to go to a white man's hospital; I knew she didn't, knew she would rather suffer than go back to that…hell…and I was determined that as long as she wanted to stay with us, she could. And we have never, ever told her that we know where the cabin is where she was held captive; it is a little way from here and while it is close to reservation lands, it is not on it, and our braves taught her where the edges of our land were. When she recovered and we had a meeting of the tribes to determine if she would stay with us, I was already determined to do whatever I could to get them to let her stay.

"She spoke to us in fluent Iroquois; I don't think the chiefs of our clans was expecting that. She requested to join us, told us she had no home, nowhere to go, nothing left to go to; and they were persuaded to allow her to join if she could pass a test. She went out into the woods for a week,, with two of our warriors tracking her, and she evaded them for a week. The intent was to give her time to decide if she truly wished to be one of the Haudenosaunee and to see if she was strong enough to be one of us.

"If the braves had caught her she would still have been accepted into the tribe, though she would not have had the status she enjoys now. But on the morning of the last day of that week, the chiefs were gathered to pass judgment and the braves had come back, not having found her. They were wondering if they should send out a search party—maybe she had gotten hurt, or she had wandered off the reservation—but just as they were trying to decide she dropped out of a tree beside the chief's lodge, walked up to him, and laid her handmade weapons at his feet."

Clayton grinned, thinking of all the clever ambushes Cam had set up for Broadview during their S&E week. It had been funny then, although he knew now that Broadview had nursed a grudge and taken it out on her later first by conspiring with Walker, then by calling ICE. "She's very clever and a brilliant tactician. I recruited her because she's excellent at stealth and evasion; her military operating specialty is a Ranger—she has a job of going in with a small team over enemy lines, using stealth to remain undiscovered and skills to live off the land until her mission is complete. She's very good at the job, too."

Jennifer smiled. "It sounds like her. By the way…" She went to a corner of the room, opened a closet, dug under it, and after a moment came out dragging the handle of a medium-sized wooden trunk with fire-charring on the side of it. "I kept the trunk that we found with the papers and writing on it. We can't read it, but perhaps you can—or you know what language it is in and can find someone who can."

Clayton, Liv, and Charlie bent over the trunk as Jennifer opened it. "It's Asian," Clayton said as he took the top sheet off the mess inside and looked it over. "I'll bet it's Korean—Cam is half-Korean and her Aunt and Uncle supposedly were also. I don't know for sure but I have linguists at base who can figure it out. Can we take this back with us?' he asked Jennifer.

She nodded. "Maybe it will help you find a way out of the current difficulty you are in. Please feel free to take it with you; keep it, dispose of it, whatever. It is yours." Clayton nodded.

"Now, in the meantime, would you like to see her house?"

Charlie's eyes lit up; Clayton suppressed a smile. Jennifer smiled at him. "She does not live far. It's a short walk to the other end of the village. Come along."


	6. Chapter 48: Base

**Chapter 48: Base**

Ten minutes later they were standing in the front door of a small one-story cottage at the far end of the village. In contrast to the comfortable hominess of Jennifer Aiennatha's farmhouse, Cam's cottage was spartan, almost stark in its simplicity. The outer room held a small TV, a bookshelf with a few books, a battered but incredibly comfortable-looking couch with what looked like an authentic bear fur thrown across the back. The kitchen had a round table in the middle of it, a giant circle cut from a tree trunk, hand-polished top with the bark left on around the edges. Modern sink and refrigerator, turned off, unplugged and empty; probably hadn't been used since she went to join the Army two years ago. The chairs were also rustic and homemade; stools, again a circle of wood, polished on top, with wooden legs. The bathroom off the kitchen was spotless and modern.

The bedroom was a surprise. Cam had found, from somewhere, a military surplus folding Army cot, and this was folded up in one corner. One entire wall of the room was mirrored, and a barre ran at waist-height along the mirrored wall. A small boombox sat on the tiny night table, and they saw CDs of ballet music in the drawer.

And that was all.

"She lived simply. Not a lot to take care of. It's very minimal, even by the People's standards, but it made her happy. I don't know if you've seen her dance, but she's an incredible dancer. Whenever the People have gatherings, she is always called on to dance; not only the spiritual and traditional dances of our people, but the kind of dancing she likes to do—the white man's dancing. It is actually part of the reason why she left."

Clayton gave Jennifer his full attention. "Tell me about that. From the way she talks, this is where she's the happiest. Why would she choose to leave this to come train as a soldier?"

"Despite what her body looks like, Clayton, she still has all the feelings and desires of a normal woman. She fell in love with a member of the tribe, Adam Barefoot, and since she was officially one of the People, and she is also considered a warrior, she is entitled to court a mate according to tradition. While it is usually the male warrior who courts a Haudenosaunee maiden and woos her with music played from a traditional courting flute, women warriors have the right to choose and court their own mates. Women who do so are respected for their bravery and courage, and since they are always of very high status with the clan and the tribe, it is almost unheard-of for the male being courted to refuse, particularly since these things are usually undertaken with the unspoken consent of both persons involved."

"Adam refused her and broke her heart." Olivia said quietly.

"That is, in essence, exactly what happened. And it took Cameron completely by surprise. Adam was the one who stood up to dance with her most often, and she had begun to teach him to partner her not only in the traditional Iroquois dances but also in the white man's dancing. He was the one who offered to assist her most often with small chores around her house here—he helped her clear the ground for the small herb garden you can see out the kitchen window, and among the Haudenosaunee no man would do such work for a woman, particularly one he is not related to, unless he was interested in her. The chiefs of our tribe looked on this with satisfaction; we knew she would not be able to have children, but to see her happy and settled with another of the People would have made all of us happier. Adam was a nice boy, born to a half-Iroquois family that lived in Ohio but he decided to come live on the reservation with us. He had been accepted by the tribe but he didn't hold any property and he didn't have much status; he was not raised as a Haudenosaunee warrior and could make no significant contribution to the tribe. We all saw this as a good thing, for both of them; she was very lonely. Even though she was willing to help out around the village and was a fully integrated member, she had very few close friends and was very shy and awkward around the men. We thought with Adam living with her she would be drawn more into the social circle of our community and be less…isolated; she would bring him status and there would be prestige in being married to the tribe's medicine woman after I stepped down, and while their marriage could not be consummated in the traditional way, there are other ways to reach physical fulfillment and Cam, because of her past, knew a lot of them and was willing to use that knowledge to ensure he never…wanted.

"In order for a Haudenosaunee marriage to happen the courtship must first take place, then when intentions are known the families of the prospective wife and groom get together and express their approbation or disapproval of the match, after which, if a majority consensus is reached as to suitability the marriage can be planned and take place. Cam spent weeks carving her courting flute, playing it outside the house where Adam lived—since the property lines among the Iroquois are usually matrilineal, he was living with some distant relatives of his mother's at the time, and while they welcomed him, they already had a large family of their own and it was…rather crowded.

"So there was a meeting between myself, as Cameron's 'mother' and clan sponsor, at my house, and Adam's family. They expressed unanimous approval of the match; she had her own property and her own status as a warrior and as a medicine-woman-in-training. She had plenty of space for two of them and if more was wanted they could build an addition together to her house; she holds enough land to do so—although I did inform her she'd have to get a larger bed," Olivia gave a choked cough that could have been a laugh, "and they both seemed happy in each other's presence. We decided to give our approval, and we asked both of them to attend the decision.

"Cam was radiant. I have never seen her so happy. She was looking forward to this…and then Adam spoke. He said that he could not believe that his family would seek to 'get rid of him' by tying him down to a 'frigid deformed woman who would never be able to bear him children' and he had gone on with the 'masquerade' just to humor her, thinking that his family would never give their approval. He said that she was a pleasant enough girl but that he could not see himself spending the rest of his life with her, he couldn't imagine anyone liking her enough to live with her, that we were all just trying to get rid of him because we didn't like him and if we expected him to marry her he would rather leave the tribe."

Charlie was staring at Jennifer open-mouthed; Clayton had never seen the big Navajo speechless before. Jennifer nodded soberly to him, then continued. "It was a blow to Cam; she burst into tears and ran out the door. I couldn't believe he could have said something so hurtful, and his mother's family couldn't believe it either. They blamed him for not telling her he was not interested before she started to court him; usually these things are settled between the two parties before it ever comes to the family meetings. That he didn't meant that he lost face with his family and the tribe, because everything he'd done had led everyone to believe he really liked her—his family said they talked to him several times about the implied significance of him helping her set up her home, but apparently he didn't listen, and he didn't care. At the same time, though, she lost face with the tribe because she didn't make sure of this before she courted him.

"Anyway, he left the reservation two days later. Cameron, when she gets upset, will run off and live in the mountains and wilderness until she gets over being upset; she disappeared for two weeks this time. We were all getting upset and ready to send out search parties for her when she reappeared, packed her things, informed us she was going to try living in the white man's world for a time, and said she was going to follow in her father's footsteps. I promised to hold her property for her until she either came back, sent word to us that she was not coming back, or if the Army told us she had died in one of the white man's wars.

"I have gotten a few letters from her in the last few years, about her training, the people around her, but nothing she's sent indicates she's made any real friends or has anyone close. She's still very lonely and isolated and alone and I was worried she would spend the rest of her life like this. She's a wonderful girl, has a lot of love and passion and life in her, and I hate to see her so…well, she's content, but she's not happy."

"When I met her during training I was impressed by her skills and I was saddened by the fact that she seemed so isolated and so lonely. I filled out the paperwork for her to join my team, and I'd like to think she's made some friends. She told us that apart from you, we're the only ones who know about her past, about the fire and what her Aunt and Uncle did to her. Two of my people have been starting to work with her on her CPTSD, the flashbacks she has." Clayton spoke.

Olivia said quietly, "I went to see her in the prison where they're currently holding her until this immigration mess gets resolved. One of the guards started to hassle us, and she stepped in between the taser and me, kept me from getting the full shock from the taser. I owe her, that's why I'm here trying to figure this out so she can come home."

Jennifer sighed. "I hope what we have here helps. Please, if there's anything else we can do that might help, please feel free to call me. Or any of the tribe; we'll be willing to help any way we can."

"I appreciate your help, Jennifer." Clayton held out a hand. "Maybe there will be something in that trunk of paperwork that we can use. I'll take it back to base and analyze it."

"Holy crap. What is this stuff?" was Wild Bill's comment as he saw Clayton and Charlie pull the large wooden trunk from the back of the Hummer. He and Courtney were performing what looked like maintenance to one of the helicopters sitting in the middle of the bay.

"We went upstate to see Cam's tribe. We talked to the tribe's medicine woman, Jennifer Aiennatha, and she told us about what her life was like after the fire, after she got away from her aunt and uncle. While Cam was recovering they went to the burned-out remains of the cabin Cam's uncle and Aunt were keeping her captive in. This was the only thing they found that survived the fire, but they saw it wasn't in English and they never wanted Cam to know what they saw, so they never gave this to her. Jennifer gave it to me, and I figured I'd bring it—I think the stuff in here's written in Korean and there might be a clue to her past and where she came from and hopefully maybe an adoption paper or something. Do we know anyone on base who speaks or reads Korean?"

"I'll go find Allie. Even if she doesn't read or speak it she'll know who does. Where are you going to be, the briefing room?" She grinned at Clayton's nod. "I'll go find her."

They had unpacked the trunk and had the contents spread out over the briefing room table by the time Courtney returned with Allie. "I don't know," Allie said doubtfully as she reached for a random sheet of paper from the top of the nearest stack. "I can read enough to figure out a few words but not well. I'll give it a shot though."

A lot of the papers were loose, but there were some that were tucked neatly into manila file folders that were still intact, albeit yellowed with age. As well, there were some notebooks filled with writing. Though unable to read the writing, Clayton and Olivia could read numbers, and they started trying to organize the mess into some sort of coherent form, taking documents that were numbered sequentially and had the same print and grouping them together.

Allie was still wading through the first stack and they were still trying to organize what was left when Clayton's desk phone rang, and Clayton grabbed for it. "General Abernathy."

"Clayton? It's Alex." Unnecessarily, because her voice was instantly recognizable. "Please please tell me you have some good news."

"We brought back a trunk full of papers written in Korean. We're trying to puzzle it out now but it's slow going."

"If there's any way you can possibly hurry it up you need to do it." There was an edge to Alex's voice. "We have to get her out of here. She's in horrible pain, her body's pretty badly infected and apparently solitary confinement's so much like what she went through with her Aunt and Uncle that she got lost in her flashbacks. I got here and demanded to be allowed to take a DNA swab, and they went to her cell and brought the restraint table out with her still on it. She was so lost that she didn't respond when they asked her if she needed to go to the bathroom, so she was lying here in her own waste almost completely catatonic. I told them to take the restraints off, and I talked her out of it…it took almost half an hour—and she finally came back and immediately started crying in pain.

"I unloaded every last piece of legal mumbo-jumbo I could think of and got them to admit her to the hospital wing for mentally ill patients. I'm sorry, but that was the only way I could get her out of solitary and under medical supervision; lying in her own filth infected her stitches and since she wasn't getting her antibiotics, her condition worsened. Now instead of being strapped to a restraint table in solitary she's strapped to a hospital bed in the medical wing and they're pumping antibiotics into her as well as her pain meds, but they also said they're going to arrange for her to see an outside specialist look at her and figure out if the surgery needs to be redone. I am so pissed right now…you have no idea. But we have to get her out of here."

"Alex…I have no idea what to do." Clayton felt drained, defeated. Helpless. "If she's under medical supervision now, no matter what for, she's better off now, right? She's getting meds and antibiotics?"

Resignation in Alex's voice. "Yes, she's better off now than she was."

"We're going through an entire box full of papers written in Korean. There has to be something in here we can use to get her out. I'll let you know as soon as we find something."

"I'll spend the night here at the apartment and see Cam again tomorrow. I told them I'm her lawyer, so they can't deny me access to her; she doesn't have a right to free legal representation because she's illegal but I told them I was retained by her employer to act on your behalf to protect a valuable employee."

"I'll sign whatever papers I have to make that official. Go ahead and tell them you're her lawyer and that her employer has retained you to act in her best interest. Okay?"

"Okay." Relief. "I was pretty sure you'd say that but I had to ask. Immigration laws have changed so much in the last few years since I've been working at the ICC that I barely know which way is up anymore. I'm actually headed to the law library at the DA's office right now to brush up on whatever I'll need to know to get her out of there. In the meantime—is Liv there?"

"I'm right here. What's wrong, Alex?"

"Cam asked me if you were okay when I brought her back from her flashback. I told her you were fine. She was really worried about the baby—and she said she saw John Munch with you, and she recognized him from when he worked her case a few years back. I was wondering if you could possibly get John to pull Cam's old casefile; I thought there might be a clue there. When John took Cam away from her aunt and uncle for that weekend he would have asked her or her teachers if there were any friends or family with whom she could stay so she didn't have to go into the Child Protective Services shelter unless it was absolutely necessary. I hope there's some clue in there to how the military found Cam's Aunt and Uncle. How did they know these two people were related to her mother? If we can figure that out maybe we can trace her genealogy."

"That's a good idea. I'll get right on it." Olivia's eyes lit up.

"Alex…thank you," Clayton sighed. "I'm so sorry to have dragged you into this."

"Well, I was the one asking the law gods to send me something interesting." They could hear the smile in Alex's voice. "I'd say this definitely qualifies. You know, you guys obviously need a lawyer on staff—I might ask Lieutenant General Johnson to sponsor me into that JAG training after all."

"Would you? I can pull some strings, try to get you assigned here. No guarantees but I can try…"

"I'm thinking very strongly about it at the moment. All right, I'm headed out to the library—I'll call you tomorrow morning after I see Cam. Hopefully she'll still be lucid and didn't flashback."


	7. Chapter 49: Waiting

**Chapter 49: Waiting**

When Clayton's phone rang the next morning he was expecting to hear Alex's voice, telling her Cam was either lucid and doing okay or that she'd had another flashback. What she did say, however, was completely unexpected.

"She's gone."

It took him a full minute to process that. "What do you mean she's gone?"

"She's _**gone**_!" And now Alex sounded as if she were close to tears. Frustrated ones, but tears nevertheless. "ICE loaded her on a plane in the middle of the night and shipped her out. I have no idea where. Sealview doesn't even know where. She's just…gone." A sob of frustration. "ICE says they can make anyone disappear. I believe that now. Oh God. Please can you call ICE and ask them where they sent her?"

Clayton made a quick decision. "Pack your things and be ready to leave at a moment's notice. The minute we find her I want you on a plane on the way to wherever she is. This is absolutely ridiculous; you told them you were her lawyer and they should have notified you before they moved her."

The voice on the other end of the phone, when he finally got hold of someone, wasn't sympathetic. "ICE does not need to inform anyone of where and when they are moving detainees. Lawyers, employers, friends, family—we are not required to notify anyone when we choose to move a detainee. Local prisons are only for holding detainees until space opens up at an immigrant detainee center."

"You mean deportation center. When you arrest someone for not having papers they get sent to a deportation center. Just like Germany was sending the Jews to deportation centers in 1939. Maybe all the legal immigrants in the US should fold their papers into stars and pin them on their jackets too. Save having to waste the authorities' time and taxpayer dollars detaining those who don't need to be detained!" Clayton was furious. "Cameron Arlington is Native American. She was here before my ancestors, and probably yours too, ever got here. We stole their land from her people, her people should be the ones detaining and deporting us! She may be half Asian but you can look at her and see her skin color is native American, the shape of her face and her cheekbones are Native American, and this whole damn conversation is moot!"

Allie spoke. "It is nearly impossible for the average person to tell who is Native American and who is Latino. Archaeologists and anthropologists postulate that the ancient civilizations of Central America came originally from the American Southwest, chased southward and northward because of a drought of epic proportions when they couldn't find food. So they spread upward into California, Utah, Nevada, eastward to New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, and downward to South America, and they spread their skin color and certain ethnic characteristics to the local tribes there. The Ute, Hopi, Zuni, Gabrielino, Sonora, Puebla, Paiute, Shoshone, Comanche, and Kiowa all shared common ancestry and influence from the Centro-American Mayan and Aztec empires. In essence, any Latin American who can clearly trace their line to the Aztecs should be protected since the American Southwest was originally theirs." Clayton stared at Allie as she calmly rattled off the list of tribes. "And since some of the Eastern tribes, like the Cherokee, the Delaware, and Cam's people the Iroquois, had plenty of trade, commerce and were also in the habit of bride-raiding to supplement their numbers in times when the tribes warred with each other, Cam's people are technically distantly related to Latinos. And if the Native American tribes are protected the Mayan and Aztec descendants should be too."

"I don't care how many tribes you can quote off the top of your head, lady, we still aren't letting Sue Park go. She needs to prove she's here legally, not by blood but by paper."

"Cam has registration papers issued by her tribe. Since they were here before we were, their claim is the prior and should be accepted."

"We don't have any rules that say that."

"Can a DNA test be used to prove that she is indeed Native American? We've been in contact with an elder of her tribe and they are deeply concerned," well, Jennifer was, "And they are willing to provide a DNA sample of a person who is full-blooded Iroquois to compare with hers to prove the genetic markers are the same." Jennifer would provide a cheek swab if he asked. He was sure of it. For Cam, she would.

"I see that note here in her file. It's pending review. Until then, she needs to find that paper."

"So can you tell us where to find her? Which detainee camp she was moved to?"

"I don't have that information yet. I'll let you know when we do." The call abruptly terminated.

The next week was the longest of Clayton's life.

Allie spent practically every minute of her free time poring over the huge stack of papers, trying to make headway through them with the assistance of a Korean-English pocket dictionary. No one else on the base spoke or read it, so it was pretty slow going.

Hawk called ICE every day to ask if they knew where Cam had been settled; the answer each time he called was 'no'. He was absolutely positive that she had to be in a camp somewhere by the end of that week; she wouldn't have been kept in constant transit for an entire week. Or would she? He wasn't sure of anything anymore, not where ICE was concerned. Before this started he was sure that everyone in the US was guaranteed constitutional rights. He was sure that everyone had the right to due process and a speedy trial. If he'd heard Alex quoting James Pendergraph before all this had started he would have laughed, sure that the US Government couldn't make anyone disappear. He was sure that prisons were for people who had done something wrong. He was sure that everyone held by the US Government was treated humanely and with respect and he was sure that medical care and mental help was provided for everyone under the umbrella of human rights.

He wasn't sure of anything anymore.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to remain polite and civil each time he called ICE. He wanted Cam back, and damn it, he wanted her back now! Alex's description over the phone of Cam's current condition worried him; he didn't know what the long term effects of CPTSD flashbacks were but he was positive it couldn't be good. Alex had spent half an hour talking Cam out of it, the same way Shana and Allie had that day in the infirmary; getting her to focus past the memories to concentrate on the here and now; the bed, the sound of Alex's voice, the sounds around her. Cam had almost lost it when she woke up and saw prison guards around her, but Alex had kept her grounded and she'd maintained her grip on reality, however tenuous.

There was no telling what kind of state she was in now. Clayton had done some private research of his own into the US immigrant detainee camps and what he'd seen and read so far horrified him. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other similar watchdog groups were coming down pretty heavily on the ICE for their treatment of detainees under their care. People were dying of things like cancer because the camps didn't provide medical treatment in a timely fashion or the treatment received was inadequate; children who were here illegally, smuggled in like Olivia's Maria Recinos, were spending years in ICE custody because there was no one to sign for them and they weren't entitled to child protective services because they were undocumented.

He was gradually starting to realize the difference between 'illegal' and 'undocumented'. To his mind, his sense of fairness and justice, 'illegal' was someone who had committed a crime and was undocumented. 'Undocumented' was someone like Cam, whose ICE file was missing a piece of paper. Now he understood the protests against the laws set in place in Arizona, and the Alabama laws currently tied up in federal litigation; the undocumented weren't criminal and shouldn't be treated as such, and in any case, whether you were legal or illegal you still had basic human rights to medical care and humane treatment.

Nothing about Alex's description of what she'd seen of Cam's treatment at Sealview had been humane. Strapping her down when she obviously needed help; not providing adequate care for her after her reconstructive surgery, all of it made Clayton absolutely furious.

Alex was shuttling back and forth between their base and the city; not because there was anything she really could do but he could feel her need to do something, so at the end of that week he gave Ettienne permission to take Charlie, Alex, Melinda Warner, and Doc upstate to the reservation, to ask Jennifer to provide a DNA swab. Melinda still had one of Cam's blood-stained ballet shoes; she swore she could pull a DNA sample off the shoe and compare it with Jennifer's for genetic markers that would prove Cam was Iroquois. Even though they hadn't yet gotten approval from ICE saying that such a DNA test would be admissible, just being able to do something would make all of them feel better and Melinda said she could do the test "as part of the ongoing investigation into Cam's rape here at base"; even though they already knew who did it, military rules did provide for cooperation between local military and civilian law enforcement, so the test wouldn't even be remarked on.

Olivia was spending some of her time at work, more time at home; Clayton could feel her frustration at her own inability to do anything and he tried to get off-base in the evenings where possible, taking her out to restaurants, some light shopping, a movie now and then. Nothing strenuous; she seemed to be getting exponentially bigger every day and he could tell she was uncomfortable; she never snapped at him but she complained constantly about her expanding bulk. It was also now impossible to have sex, but he found that he didn't really miss it at all; just spending time with her was a reward all its own, and it wasn't a necessary component of their relationship.

He also wasn't her only visitor; Allie and Shana and Courtney were popping in to see her, and each time they went they brought gifts. Women seemed to be universally fascinated with babies, and even though The Girls were professional soldiers they apparently weren't immune to the lure of August's imminent arrival (sometime in December, Liv told him her doctor said) and almost every day Clayton and the guys found the girls exclaiming over 'something cute' they'd found in their travels that 'Liv just had to have' for the baby. One of the purchases Clayton helped Liv pick out and take up to her apartment was a small dresser for the baby clothes, baby shoes, baby socks and blankets and other paraphernalia that was starting to accumulate. Olivia said laughingly that no one looking at the stuff she already had would guess that she had no extended family; she had enough to account for a dozen aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents! Clayton's reply to that comment was to tell her to forget she didn't have family; he, and the personnel on his base, were all family and she was now part of it. Her warm smile and quiet hand squeeze was enough to warm his heart.

His gifts were running more to the practical; diaper bag, bottles, and several cases of diapers because he guessed that the first few days at home she'd be sore and tired and wouldn't want to leave the apartment to go pick up diapers and formula and whatever else she needed. He also quietly tallied up his accumulated leave time (a month) and was planning on taking all of it starting the second week of December. Normally he didn't take leave time; the base was home for him, and he'd never seen the need—but this time he was looking forward to being able to spend a whole month with Liv and the baby—his son!—and it would also be a good chance to see if Dash was ready to handle a base command of his own. Even with New York City's bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic the base was only an hour's drive from the apartment, so if something came up that Dash couldn't handle Clayton would still be in easy reach. He was confident that they would have this mess with ICE and Cam fixed by then. Alex had also been talking quietly about getting her own apartment; she didn't want to move while Liv was still pregnant but if Clayton were there for the last couple of weeks before the baby came she wouldn't have to worry about her friend, and there would also be the benefit of all that free labor—Ettienne and Clayton would be insulted if they weren't allowed to help Alex move and rearrange the furniture and whatever else needed to be done.

So it was with a sense of optimism that he answered his phone the Monday after Alex, Ettienne, and Charlie's trip upstate with Doc and Melinda "General Abernathy."

"General Abernathy? My name is Dr. Rajem. I am a practicing OB GYN in Alamogordo, New Mexico. I recently saw an ICE-detained patient who said her name was Cameron Arlington, and she begged me to please call this number and ask for 'Clayton Abernathy'?"

"That's me, oh God, you saw Cam, is she all right?"

"She is…not well. Her body is badly infected from a neglected and not well cared for surgical site. I had to give her a local and remove the stitches in order to allow the infection to drain, then put the stitches back in. The guards employed by the ICE to transport her from the ICE detainee facility refused to remove her shackles, and so full diagnosis and treatment was difficult. In addition, they refused to leave the room so I had to treat her in full sight of them. It was humiliating and distressing for her—we spoke in Navajo the entire time so that they would not know what she was saying, and it was then that she begged me to call you and tell you where she was."

"She spoke Navajo?" That floored Clayton. How had she…Charlie?

"She did not speak it very well; she said that a close friend of hers was teaching her the language and that he was Navajo from Taos Pueblo. Charlie Ironknife. I recognize that name as one of the People and told her I would try to get her message out."

"But she's okay, she was coherent and lucid and she recognized where she was and who she was. Thank God—thank you, Dr. Rajem, for letting us know, we've been going absolutely crazy worrying about her."

"You're welcome. I am part Egyptian yes, but my mother was Navajo and her people are my people too. I do not know if she will be allowed to see me again; she is due to come back to me for removal of the stitches but there is no guarantee that they will bring her back here; they may take her to see another doctor. But please…if you see here…tell her to sign the papers."

"Sign what papers?"

"The deportation papers. You must understand—she is in very bad shape right now; she will die if she continues in ICE detention. Deportation to whatever country she originally came from would be preferable to dying here of an infection because they do not allow the detainees to shower more than once a week, there are inadequate facilities to care for her post traumatic stress disorder and the guards here are…not kind."

"She shouldn't be deported. She's looks Korean, but she's half Native American, Iroquois, from her father. Deportation shouldn't even be an issue! It wouldn't be an issue if ICE had all the paperwork they were supposed to! She's not guilty, so why should she sign?"

"Because they will not let her out of these camps until she agrees to be deported. You are American, right? Born here?"

"Yes."

"You do not know what it is like to be an immigrant in this country now. Those the ICE detains vanish into the system; very, very few are granted hearings in front of a judge and even fewer are released. Many are deported—even immigrants who are here legally can be deported. I have naturalization papers, but because of these new laws, I am stopped and asked for my paperwork at least once a day. Each time I am stopped it takes an hour and a half for them to verify my naturalization paper is genuine. She will not be able to wait until she has a hearing; her physical and mental condition is deteriorating. Please get her to sign—life outside the US cannot possibly be worse than dying in it."

"Then we'll have to figure out how to get her out. Thank you for your concern, Dr. Rajem, thank you for giving us news, for telling her she is all right and telling us where she is."


	8. Chapter 50: New Mexico

**Chapter 50: New Mexico**

"She's in New Mexico."

It took a moment for that to sink in, then Alex yelped, "What?"

Clayton held the phone away from his ear, winced, shook his head, then returned to his conversation. "She's in New Mexico. ICE shipped her across country to New Mexico. They took her out of the detainee camp to a doctor to see about her medical condition and the doctor spoke Navajo. Apparently Charlie's been teaching her some of his language and she knew enough to ask a half-Navajo doctor to call us."

"Have you talked to ICE yet?"

"No. I decided not to let them know that we know where she is. I was planning on having you stop over at the detainee center and just ask for her. If they know we know where she is they might move her again. I don't want to risk that happening. The doctor she was taken to see had to take the stitches out of her body and let the infection drain, then put them back in. According to him she's supposed to come back in a week to have the stitches looked at but he doesn't know if they will bring her back to him—he says he rarely ever sees the same patient twice."

"Oh my God what a nightmare."

"Yes. I agree wholeheartedly," Clayton said feelingly. "Okay. Here's what I want to do. I want you on the ground in New Mexico as fast as you can, that means no civilian flights. There's a transport leaving out of Fort Hamilton heading to California in three hours; Colonel Gold has agreed to take you and Charlie out to Arizona and drop you off at Holloman Air Force Base when they stop there to refuel. Holloman is only about sixty miles from the detention center in Otero County New Mexico. You should be there by tomorrow morning."

"Why Charlie?"

"Because Charlie speaks Navajo. Alex, the doctor wasn't allowed to be alone with Cam, and he had to treat Cam with full body shackles still in place—ICE rules. That means Cam won't have any privacy and the only way you're going to be able to talk to her without them knowing what you're talking about is in a language that few of these guards are going to understand."

"That's a good idea. I think I'll ask Charlie to teach me a few words too. Now, what do I tell her? Have we made any progress?"

"Allie's found a folder of stuff she thinks is government paperwork, so we have to be pretty close to a breakthrough. It's only a matter of time now; we're close. We should have her out of there by the end of the week." He hesitated, then decided he should give her the whole truth. "Alex, the doctor who saw her said she's pretty bad. He told us to tell her if we see her to just sign the deportation papers—"

"She's not illegal! If she's not guilty why sign?"

"He said that living outside the US would have to be preferable to dying in a deportation camp."

Silence for a long moment. Then Alex swore, fervently and at length.

Despite the grimness of the situation, Clayton had to smother the chuckle. Alex had obviously been hanging out with Courtney too much; in addition to looking alike, they were even starting to swear alike. "I'll make sure to tell Courtney her language is a bad influence on you."

"Why, you—"

"Uh-uh, Private Cabot, watch out, I'm still your commanding officer!"

"—sir."

He laughed at her; he couldn't help it. It was just as fun teasing Alex and Liv as it was to tease Allie and Shana and Courtney. There was little enough humor in the kind of work they did, the business of killing that they were so good at, that he seized it whenever he could. "All right, Alex, grab your things and head to Fort Hamilton, Charlie will meet you there."

"I'm taking my laptop and I'll keep in touch via email—you have mine, right?"

Yes, he had hers. And Liv's. "Be careful, Alex."

"I will, General."

So he wasn't surprised, the next day, to see an email from Alex in his email box.

_Got to Holloman okay. I have to tell you looking at those lines of planes ranged out in rows on the desert floor looks hellaciously impressive. Charlie looked at them and said he wished Frank had been able to come—seems Frank grew up staring at these planes._

_ Base Commander Dennis Pittman was extraordinarily gracious—might have a little something to do with the fact that he found me attractive, but at least he was professional enough not to show it. Charlie standing there doing his best 'formidable Indian brave' impression could have had something to do with it._

Clayton had to chuckle at that. Yes, he could imagine guys falling over themselves over Alex Cabot's tall blond beauty—with clothes on, it was hard to tell that earlier in the summer she'd been comatose and barely alive in his infirmary. But he could also imagine Charlie standing just over Alex's shoulder, arms folded, doing his best impression of a formidable, unmovable mountain, and he could imagine that would dampen some overeager military personnel quite a bit.

_They offered Charlie and I a ride into Chaparral, and we passed the Otero County Detainee Center on the way. Clayton, I fail to see how the detainee center could be any better than Sealview in New York; it looks just the same, like a prison building, with people in orange jumpsuits walking around in the yard outside. You know what gets to me? They don't have any kind of recreational equipment. Not even the balls and hoops that practically every prison has. And most of these people aren't even criminals, their files are just missing a piece of paper! They're undocumented, not illegal! Mass murderers, rapists, and violent offenders have more rights than Cam does, who has done nothing wrong past missing a piece of paper and getting on Colonel Broadview's bad side!_

_Base Commander Pittman asked me what we were doing here. I didn't know how much we could tell him about who we are and how we ended up out here—I didn't want to bring up the SERE training and the court martial, so I simply told him that the ICE was holding a US Army Ranger until a missing adoption paper could be found. He seemed sympathetic, told us to let him know if there was anything they could help us with, because apparently they don't really like the sight of that deportation center sitting down there by the New Mexico/Texas/Mexico border. _

_Clayton, he said that if she's current, serving, active duty US Army, then the Army should be responsible for detaining her until her status is sorted out, not ICE. Can you look into this, or check with Lieutenant General Johnson? It makes sense—the U.S. Military has its own prisons and that has to be better than sitting in this camp._

_Anyway, we got to Chaparral and found a hotel room. You're not going to believe this—the guy at the desk asked Charlie if he was a legal citizen. Charlie opened his wallet and showed the guy his military ID and his tribe registration; the guy looked doubtful. I asked him if he thinks Charlie assaulted a Native American and stole his paperwork, and he said he wouldn't put it past any 'dirty Mexican'._

_Clayton, I swear the atmosphere down here is downright poisonous. If you don't happen to be blond, blue-eyed, and apparently white they'll stop you and ask if you're an American citizen. Charlie hasn't said anything but he's gotten very, very quiet since we've gotten here—particularly since we were stopped by an officer on our way out to a store to grab something to eat. Normally I'd say cops are our friends but in this case he definitely wasn't—he acted like he was just looking for an excuse to arrest both of us. You know, when I saw the law was passed that would let a cop check to see if you're legal, a couple of guys in the DA's office said 'hey, I don't mind getting stopped for a few minutes if it'll take care of the illegal problem'—it's not a few minutes, Clayton, we waited an entire hour and a half! Just for them to check Charlie! They never even asked me to prove I was legal, they just assumed because his skin's darker than mine that he wasn't! _

_This ICE policy of 'guilty until proven innocent' is bullcrap. For a country that says it's 'free' all of a sudden we're looking an awful lot like Nazi Germany! I swear if Charlie didn't have his tribe registration on him they would have arrested him just on suspicion alone! There's no 'reasonable seizure' or 'due process'—I look at what's happening down here and I wonder if this is the same America that I got a law license to practice in. If it were Liv I'd bet she wouldn't bother to ask papers from everyone she stopped either—and if her superior told her to I'll bet she'd resign!_

Clayton had to laugh at that; yes, Liv probably would—and she'd tell her superior where to shove it, too. But at the same time, he couldn't imagine Don Cragen forcing any of his detectives to check everyone's papers—the entire idea was abhorrent to him, as an American Military General, and he knew instinctively without needing to ask that Don Cragen would too.

_I don't wonder legal immigrants are fleeing the area. I would too. I am never moving to a state that adopts these laws; I can see so many ways this could go wrong. That cop didn't like Charlie because of the color of his skin; if Charlie had had actual Immigration papers I wouldn't have put it past him to have torn those papers up right there and then arrested Charlie for not having them. It's so easy for someone holding a grudge to exercise it here, and Charlie's not alone in wanting to get this over and done with as soon as possible so we can come home._

_We tried something different this morning—before we headed out to grab breakfast we both put on our fatigues. And you know what? Not stopped once. No one said anything rude; in fact, we got smiles and nods everywhere, and a few people said 'thank you for your service. And we got military discounts at the restaurant, which, I'll admit was kind of neat. Thing is, it was just amazing how Charlie's skin color vanished behind his uniform; they didn't see him as 'other' anymore._

_There's a definite double standard here and it stinks. We're on our way out to the deportation center now; I stopped back here to change clothes into something 'lawyer-like'. I called them earlier and listened to the entire automated menu; apparently detainees can see lawyers any day of the week during 'normal' business hours but relatives and friends are only allowed to visit on the weekends and_ _it's limited to an hour, so I'll have better luck seeing her if I go as her lawyer. I'll let you know what happened when we get back._

He sat for a long time, staring at the computer screen and Alex's email sitting silently on the screen. Since Cam was active duty, currently-serving military, technically it _was_ the Army's responsibility to detain her while the mess was sorted out.

He left his office and headed down the hall to the small conference room where Allie had set up piles of papers from the large charred wooden trunk, opened the door and poked his head in. "Got a minute?"

Allie looked up and smiled tiredly. "Yeah. I guess."

He came all the way in, sat down at the table across for her, and studied her critically. "You look tired."

She stretched her arms over her head to work the kinks out of her back, and then leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes with a sigh. "Staring at all this fine print makes my eyes hurt. The Asian characters are so different from ours, it kind of requires a whole different mindset and a different way of thinking just to puzzle out the syntax and grammar forms."

He tried to wrap his head around the outside of that, and failed. "I'll take your word for it; you're the linguist here, not me."She cracked open one eye and gave him a raised-eyebrow, doubtful look, and he laughed even as he patted her hand. "It's okay. I'm just teasing. I actually came to ask you a different question."

"Shoot," Allie said without opening her eyes.

"Alex sent me an email from New Mexico. The Base commander down there was… enthusiastically welcoming… and Alex said she suspected she might have had a problem if Charlie hadn't been doing his best, and I'll quote her here, 'formidable Indian brave' impression."

Allie cracked up. Clayton reflected that she looked younger when she laughed, and wondered if Flint liked hearing Allie laugh as much as he did. The slight Celtic lilt in her voice was barely noticeable when she talked unless she chose to put on one of her (many) mimicked accents, but you could hear it when she laughed. She'd been absolutely unique when he'd recruited her for the project; now, years later, she was still unique.

So was Shana. And Courtney. And even Alex. And, of course, Liv. Five extraordinary women in the most unlikeliest of places, in the most unlikely of friendships. He was incredibly lucky to have such a team. And Cam…if she made it through, if she survived this physically and emotionally intact, would make six. Six women with extraordinary skills and talents.

Thank God he had a base full of thirty other guys to balance them out.

"So anyway," he said when Allie's laughter died down to giggles, "Alex said that Base Commander Pittman asked her, since Cam is currently active, serving military, why the military isn't detaining her instead of ICE. And Alex didn't have an answer for that. Do you?"

Allie's giggles stopped. She sat for long moments completely silent and motionless, eyes closed; to someone else she might have looked asleep; Clayton knew she was actually thinking very hard. When Shana thought hard, she chewed her lower lip. When Allie thought hard, she closed her eyes and went completely motionless. When Courtney was thinking hard, the vehicles in the garage mysteriously fell apart.

He wondered what Cam did when she was thinking.

"You know what…I don't know the answer to that. The US Armed Forces maintain jurisdiction over their own in most cases, and we do maintain prisons for just that reason. So no…I don't see a reason why she couldn't be detained in a military prison instead of n ICE camp. But we have to think about something, Clayton—military prison is awfully restrictive. Wouldn't it be better for her to be in an Immigrant detainee camp? After all, she isn't being detained for something criminal, she's being held for a civil infraction, and regardless of how they treated her at Sealview, it was like that because it was a criminal facility. This civil facility has to be better."

"According to Alex, it's the same as a prison. Maybe worse. Orange jumpsuits and people walking around a yard. She said there wasn't even a basketball hoop and balls like there are at practically every other prison out there. There's no recreational equipment that she could see. And the doctor who called us up to let us know where she was said that when they brought her into his office to be treated they refused to take her restraints—shackles—off; he had to treat her still chained."

Allie stared at him. "That's inhuman."

"That's ICE. Allie…can you coordinate with Shana and figure out how we can get Cam into a military prison instead of the detainee camp?"

"Well, she's female so she'd go to Miramar. She'd get to wear her fatigues there, although she couldn't wear her cover or rank or insignia. She'd be able to work—they have a woodworking shop, if I remember correctly, and I think she'd enjoy that—she certainly enjoyed carving her flute. Although, Charlie kept her company then and that probably made the task of carving a bit more enjoyable." Allie grinned. "But she'd get medical help there, and better mental help—the military has experts trained to deal with CPTSD and it'll be better than our fumbling efforts. Shana and I aren't trained psychologists; we just did what we could to get her back in touch with reality and reason her out of the self-destructive thinking she displayed, try to get her to face what happened and deal with it instead of avoiding the topic. All right, Clayton, let me finish with this stack for the day and then I'll talk to Shana. We'll see if we can find some legal loophole we can slide Cam through and get out of there."


	9. Chapter 51: Exploitation

**Chapter 51: Exploitation**

It wasn't until that evening that Clayton saw another email from Alex. He opened it with relief; he'd been worried that something would happen to them. And then he read it, and her first few sentences firmed his belief that he'd asked Shana and Allie to do the right thing.

_I hate that camp. Jesus, Clayton, there is NO difference between a deportation camp and Sealview. Absolutely none. Fourteen foot fences topped with razor wire, orange jumpsuits, full shackling… I'll bet half the people in here aren't even guilty of anything except losing paperwork!_

_ They only have three visiting rooms, and there are lines of people waiting. I was told that if I wanted to see her I could talk to her in the hallway, but they also said that any words spoken in the hallway were public and could be used against her. I was glad you sent Charlie; being able to speak to her in Navajo pretty much guaranteed her privacy._

_ She's so thin, Clayton, she has to have lost at least a third of her body weight since the first time I met her. I'll wager she doesn't tip the scale above a hundred now. She walks slowly, like every step hurts—I guess that's the aftereffects of the surgery. She's pale and tired-looking, her wrists and ankles have those horrible red marks on them from wearing shackles too long, and there was no life left in her eyes when she first walked in; she looked like she was almost dead. And then she saw us, and her whole face lit up, and she ran for Charlie and started crying, and he just held her…I don't think his eyes were quite dry either. I know mine weren't. _

_ They rang the lunch bell while we were talking, and Cam never even looked up. I asked her if she was going to eat lunch, but she told us by the time she gets there and gets to the front of the line there will hardly be anything left, and they don't give you seconds. I asked her if they would hold her portion for her, but she said they don't do that, that if you miss a meal because a visitor comes to see you then you just have to wait for the next one. I wanted to leave right there but she said there was no need, she wouldn't give up a minute of her time with us. _

_This hasn't been a good thing for her; she's used to being alone but this has been too much for her, and I can see now she's hungry for a friendly face and someone who **cares **about her. She and Charlie hugged—as best as she could with shackles on!—for almost five minutes. She was willing to skip a meal she couldn't afford to skip just to be able to talk to us, and that says a lot about what she's thinking right now. They've been giving her sedatives and downers to keep her CPTSD under control so she doesn't flashback instead of getting her psychotherapy treatment; while the drugs are helping her manage the CPTSD, she says they make her feel sick and groggy a lot of the time and she hates it. Jesus, Clayton, this whole thing just…hasn't been fair._

_ Before we left I arranged an expense account for her with the camp's administration. I didn't know how you wanted this set up, so for the moment I just put some of my own money into her account—and I got the numbers so that you can arrange to put her pay at her disposal. With money in her camp account she'll be able to make phone calls, pay for small items they'll let her have out of the camp commissary like snacks—she desperately needs to eat more, just walking makes her tired right now and I gather she's spending a lot of time sleeping. She signed up to work around the detainee center, scrubbing floors and doing dishes and stuff—but she tires easily and can't work a whole day, and the stitches between her legs don't help either, so she hasn't been able to earn the $1 a day they pay working detainees. That money also buys her other things like pencils and paper and envelopes to write letters —they'll open it and read it to 'check it for factuality and relevance', they said, but I know, and you know, that if these people write about how miserable they are here the campwould get shut down really fast so they're pretty much censoring the mail that the detainees send out._

_ Charlie told her in Navajo that we were working on it, that we'd visited her tribe upstate, and I saw her fight tears at the thought of home. She asked if Jennifer was doing okay, asked how her cottage was doing and if her garden was being tended, and we told her yes, don't worry about it, we're working on getting her out, and she nodded and then our time was up. _

_ Charlie was really quiet all the way back here to our hotel room but once we got back he shucked his fatigues and got into regular clothes and said he was going to go visit the one of the local reservations—not his people, his home is somewhere in the northern part of New Mexico, but I figured he must have had friends a little closer so I told him go on ahead and I'd be okay, and he went. I showered and ate and then sat down to write you and let you know how the day went._

For some reason the thought of Charlie and Alex splitting up down there worried Clayton; it wasn't until he sat back and tried to figure out why it worried him that he realized why. He'd subconsciously started thinking of them as being in 'hostile' territory, and teams never split up in hostile territory. But this wasn't, it was New Mexico, in the United States, for goodness sake, his people should be fine!

_Yeah, like Cam is fine_. He hit the print button on the email, waited for the printer to deliver the sheets of paper to the tray, then headed for the small conference room Allie and Shana were using, hoping he would find both of them in.

Luck was with him. They were. "Read this," he said without preamble, handing Shana the sheet s of paper. Shana read it through, her face getting harder and harder with each paragraph, then passed it across the table to Allie. By the time Allie was finished the anger in the room was palpable.

"Now tell me Miramar could possibly be any worse than this."

Allie shook her head slowly. "It's not. Clayton, as much as we soldiers hate the thought of spending any time in military prison, right now I have to agree with you that it would be kinder for her to be there than here. Military prisons are centered around the idea that once the soldier gets out he'll have to either go back to his unit or out into civilian life and he'll have to be a contributing member of society. It's a little different for men, Leavenworth actually has facilities to invoke and enforce the death penalty for soldiers—but women are very rarely ever sentenced to life in prison, much less the death penalty, and they're usually released after serving a specified amount of time so the focus is on rehabilitation and avoiding recidivism—repeat offenders. Cam will get some extensive counseling while she's in there for her CPTSD, and as for recidivism—once we find the damn paper her ICE file's missing I get the feeling she'll never let it leave her sight again. There won't be a repeat of what she's in here for. So yes, Miramar would be a better solution for her than ICE detention."

Shana leaned forward. "And we think we found Cam's ticket."

"Really." Clayton sat up straight. "You think we can get her into Miramar?"

"Yes. I'd been struggling with this, but…" Allie held up a folder. "I spent a lot of time struggling over this—I didn't know if making some of this known to certain persons would cause more harm than good, but I think this might solve some immediate problems. This is written in Korean, but Clayton, it carries the stamp of the North Korean intelligence agency."

"North Korea?"

"The information is years out of date—it details the beginning of the North Korean nuclear armament. And we know now that they have nukes—they've proved it several times over the last few years. I can't read all of it, but I got enough to realize that Cam's Aunt and Uncle were North Korean and may have been North Korean spies." She shifted some papers around, tapped a stack of notebooks. "This is Cam's ticket out of that ICE detainee camp. According to what I can read of this, part of what they did while Cam was locked in that basement was to pick her brain of every single last detail she could remember of her life at Osan; the layout, the personnel, the number of vehicles stationed there, the Air Force squadrons housed there, whatever they could think of that Cam might possibly know, either from direct exposure, running around base with her father, or anything she might have overheard—kids overhear a lot more than parents give them credit for, especially when they're shy kids like Cam."

Clayton was stuck on her earlier words. "They _interrogated_ her about her life at Osan? They interrogated a _fifteen year old girl_ about a US military base?"

"They couldn't get the information any other way."

"But…the child porn…"

"They interrogated her to provide information to…whoever they were reporting to… then they sold Cam to pedophiles to make enough money to live comfortably. With her, they had all their needs met in one place. She earned them money and provided them with information. That it completely screwed up her life and her head didn't matter, because they never planned to allow her to reach adulthood. Cam was right when she said she thought they were going to kill her; they were. They were going to sell her, sell her outright, to a guy who made underground snuff films." Allie saw Clayton's horrified look. "No one would ever miss her, Clayton; New York authorities thought she'd gone to live upstate with them, the people here upstate were told she'd gone back to Korea, and in essence she had simply disappeared. If Cam hadn't set fire to the house and killed them, she would have been sold, killed, and no one would ever have been the wiser."

"Oh God." For a moment Clayton didn't see Cam the soldier; he saw a slender young woman dancing on a polished wooden barracks floor; saw her sword-dancing with Scarlett, saw her carving a flute with Charlie. "How could they do that? How could anyone do that? To a _**child**_!"

"Because they didn't care. And because…because I think she might not be related to them at all."

That seized his attention. "They're _not_ her Aunt and Uncle?"

"I didn't say that. I said they _may not_ be. Park is a very, very common Korean surname; I think, if they were actually North Korean spies, when our government contacted them and said 'hey we have this little girl here, her father was based at Osan and he died and we're trying to find relatives she can go to, you have the same last name, could she be related to you?' and they heard 'Osan', they heard 'little girl', and they may have said they were relatives of her mother in order to get the government to give her to them. And from that day they would have started a very careful campaign to cut her off from the world, to isolate her and get the world to eventually forget about her, then victimize, interrogate, and, once they had gotten what they considered all usable information about the US military base out of her, they exploited her ruthlessly for material gain and rented her to an increasingly violent series of pedophiles with the intent of eventually killing her when she was too old to be of use to them or too old to be attractive to their clientele."

Clayton put that aside for the moment; if he thought about it too hard he was going to be sick. "Okay. So how is this going to help us get Cam out of there?"

"We take this to Lieutenant General Johnson. The information may be dated, but the military still needs to investigate any possible espionage. He can order her pulled from ICE detention and moved to Miramar on the premise that she could have been compromised, used unwittingly to pass information to the enemy, maybe even, if we play our cards right, brainwashed and programmed by the two spies who called themselves her Aunt and Uncle. She would then become a possible information leak, no matter how old, and that is definitely a military problem so she'd be brought to Miramar.

"While she was there she'd be protected, be subject to extensive psychoanalysis by the best the military has to offer. They wouldn't interrogate her as a spy, their focus would be on figuring out what she knew that might have been a target of her aunt and uncle's interrogation efforts and they'd be trying to help her overcome any possible 'brainwashing'. They'll be a lot gentler with her because she was very young when it happened, and the CPTSD will get treated along the way. And in between the psych sessions, her medical condition will be monitored and treated, she'll be free to move around Miramar, working within her strength and ability in the Miramar factory, doing whatever chores are assigned her, maybe have a little free time to herself to start regaining her equilibrium. And in the meantime she'd be allowed to have visitors—anyone above E6 is considered a 'command visit' so we could see her, track her progress. It's not a long-term solution, Clayton, but at the moment it's the best we have. It's the only thing I can think of that would get her out of there fast."

"Fast?"

"Think, Clayton." Shana blew out her breath. "ICE knows that if we are in contact with Cam we can bring some extremely unwelcome, unwanted attention to their doorstep. Public approval for soldiers right now is riding quite high after Osama Bin Laden's death; and at the same time ICE's public approval is pretty low right now because the American public out there is watching the economy go down the drain and they're looking for a scapegoat and unfortunately, illegals—particularly those of Latino descent—are becoming the whipping boy for American frustration over the current issues.

"Getting back to what I was saying, however—we have to move fast. As soon as ICE knows that we've been in touch with her, that we found her, they may move her again, and she'll be more closely watched this time. There may not be another chance for her to get some sympathetic doctor to call us or Liv will just happen to see her in a hallway. We were lucky twice, but luck runs out."

The thought that Cam might vanish again decided Hawk's course of action. "All right. I'll go to Johnson with this. Now, are we any closer to figuring out how to get her out of prison altogether?"

"We were going to ask you about that." Allie looked up at Clayton squarely. "I can't find anything, anywhere, so the only thing I can think of now is to go back to Osan. I found a list of personnel who were based there fifteen years ago—remember Cam said she and her father shared house space with her father's best friend, and their son Jack Hammond was like her little brother growing up? I don't know what the parents names were but I'm looking up every 'Jack Hammond' I can find. If we can find the young man, we can find the parents, and if we can find the parents maybe they'll know where those papers were filed or if they even existed. Clayton, in order for Cam to live with her father on base there had to have been some kind of proof she was his, and even if ICE doesn't have that paper his closest friend would have known. And his friend's wife would have had to have some kind of documentation for Cam to attend base school along with the other military kids at Osan—there would have had to be something official and legal for Cam to have gotten this far in the military. Her Social Security number checks out, her military ID and tribal registration, it all checks out so as far as the rest of the government is concerned she is legal."

"I…hadn't even…Art and Annie Hammond. And a son, Jack Hammond. Jack Hammond's a year and a half or two years younger than Cam, so you're looking for someone who's about twenty-three." Hawk dredged the details up from his memory. "They were really close—Cam said she called her 'Mama Annie' and 'Uncle Art', and they shared a four-bedroom house on base."

"Then that's our next step. We have to find this family, see what they know about Cam's arrival and life and adoption. They might be the key to ending this entire horrible nightmare."

"Okay. Let me go and talk to Alex, then Lieutenant General Johnson, and I'll let you know what I find out, Good work, Allie, Shana. You both deserve a vacation for everything you've done so far."

He headed back to his office, where he turned on his computer and sent Alex a hurried email.

_Allie and Shana think they found a way to get Cam out of ICE detention. That trunk full of papers Jennifer Aiennatha gave us had some paperwork in it that carries the stamp of the North Korean intelligence agency, and the girls said that could be construed as a military security leak. They think that if I take that to Lieutenant General Johnson we can get her out of ICE detention and sent to Miramar Naval Consolidated Brig in California. They'll keep her there while she's supervised and monitored and she'll receive psych assessments to make sure she hasn't been brainwashed, but in the meantime she'll be able to wear her uniform, she'll be funneled into constructive supervised activities and be able to do some work in the factories at Miramar, and in the meantime she'll receive medical and mental care and we would be able to visit._

_As to the long term problem—Allie's tracking down the family that Cam and her dad lived with while they were at Osan. Art and Annie Hammond, and a son, Jack. Cam mentioned them a while back, and I made a mental note to myself to look them up and let them know what happened to her—Cam said they all promised to write but I'll bet my pension her Aunt and Uncle threw away all those letters and never let Cam see them, which is why she thought they never wrote—but in all the fuss it slipped my mind until now._

_You and Charlie sit tight down there. I'm going to talk to Lieutenant General Johnson and let him know what we found out. In the meantime, be very careful about letting people know who you are—Shana thinks that if ICE found out we know where Cam is they might move her, and we might not be lucky enough to find her again._


	10. Chapter 52: Johnson

**Chapter 52: Johnson**

"You're kidding," Lieutenant General Johnson stared at Hawk in outright disbelief.

"My linguist doesn't read Korean well, and it's taken this long to actually figure out enough of it to realize what we had, but the stamp of the North Korean Intelligence agency is pretty easy to spot," Hawk said. "My question now would be how they got into the US and how they proved they were indeed Cam's relatives in order to gain control of her, but that's a question for another time. Right now it's urgent that we act to get Cam out of ICE detention—if they interrogated her as a child about her life at Osan, then it's entirely possible that they could have brainwashed her into acting as a sleeper agent."

"There's something else you're not telling me, Hawk. What's the real reason we have to move this fast on what is a relatively minor issue? You said yourself; your linguist identifies the information as being years out of date—we know that North Korea has nuclear warheads by now."

"Cam Arlington is an active, serving member of the US Army. One of our elite Rangers, no less. That puts her in a position to observe a lot and possibly to transmit a lot of information to the enemy and identifies her as a possible source of an information leak. This is of prime importance to the US military and needs to be addressed as quickly as possible."

"And—?"

_Have to give the man points for being perceptive._ Hawk sighed and sat down in his chair. "ICE detention is _horrible_, Johnson. Cam was held for a week in solitary confinement in a regular prison because they said that her CPTSD made her a danger. She had flashbacks while she was in solitary, and they either didn't want to deal with it or didn't have personnel equipped to deal with it so they just strapped her down to a restraint table and left her in solitary. Because she was so out of it, she couldn't tell them she had to get up and go use the bathroom, and she ended up lying in her own waste for apparently hours at a time. This led to the infection at her surgical site, for which she was never provided adequate aftercare, never given her pain meds, never given the antibiotics she needed to fight that infection. When I created waves at the prison, told them I would file a lawsuit against them and the ICE for their treatment of Cam, they shipped her out on a plane in the middle of the night without informing anyone, even Cam's lawyer, and sent her across the country to a facility in New Mexico, where she is currently. I'm worried that if we don't move fast they'll ship her out again and I don't know where she'd end up this time.

"We found her the first time when Olivia was at the prison interviewing a suspect in the course of one of her investigations and she saw Cam going by in the hall. She told me Cam was at Sealview. Then when the ICE took her into a half-Navajo doctor's clinic in New Mexico she begged him in his language to call us and let us know where she was, and he did so. The next time they move her they'll watch her even closer and I don't know if she'll be able to get word out again."

"Didn't you call the ICE? They would have told you where she was."

Hawk laughed bitterly. "No, they didn't. They told me their procedure is to take my name and phone number and the name of the person I'm looking for and send it to all of their holding facilities. The facility would check their lists and if the person I was looking for was there we'd be informed. If the detainee had money they'd be able to make a phone call. No one ever called us to let us know where she was."

"That's crazy. The government can't just make people disappear."

"Johnson, before all this started I would have agreed with you. Now I know better. The ICE is abusing their 'discretionary powers' to detain illegal and undocumented immigrants and reform is desperately needed. However, that's a system-wide thing and neither you nor I can make any immediate difference in how things are run. We can, however, make an immediate difference in the life of one young woman who the ICE is wrongfully detaining. Since she is a member of the US Armed Forces and a member of the command you are responsible for directly supervising, her disposition is therefore your responsibility."

Johnson sighed. "You and your unit can be a pain in the ass, you know that, right?" Hawk didn't say a word, and Johnson finally sighed again. "All right. Let me see what I can do."

"Again, I must stress that time is of the essence—"

"General Abernathy. You have repeatedly stressed this throughout our conversation; I do understand the urgency. You have brought this to my attention and I will act on your information, but these things do take time and your carping on the situation will not help achieve its resolution any faster." His tone softened. "I am unhappy with the lapse in communication and I will be investigating the lack of medical and psych care given an active-duty serving member of the US Armed Forces during her confinement. But in order for me to get this done you have to let me get to it."

Clayton accepted the gentle rebuke and snapped a salute. "Yes Sir." And the vidscreen went dark.

He opened up his email program and sent Alex a quick email. _I contacted Lieutenant General Johnson, he understands the urgency of the situation and he'll move as quickly as he can to get her out of there. The only prison the US Armed Forces has for female members is Naval Consolidated Brig Miramar in California, so that's likely going to be your next stop. In the meantime, keep an eye on the camp and let me know if it looks like they're moving Cam out of there._

He turned off his computer and sat back, stretching, trying to decide what he wanted to do with his evening. Going to see Liv had its attractions, but he wanted to be close if Alex found out they were shipping Cam out, or if Johnson called to say they'd successfully extracted Cam from ICE detention.

He was still debating when he heard a tap on his office door. "Come in," he called, and to his surprise it was Shana who fairly flew in, eyes snapping green sparks.

"The Hammonds did write to Cam. Lots of times. Allie and I found a whole bunch of letters in envelopes that had been opened and apparently read and put back in and I will bet it wasn't Cam who opened them!" She slapped a paper down on his desk breathlessly. "Read this."

Clayton picked it up.

_Dear Cammie;_

_ We really miss you out here at Osan. Everyone says so. We all got so used to you zipping around base on your bike and doing the odd chore here and there. Base Commander Felton's wife, in particular, misses you a lot, and not just because you'd ride to the Base Exchange for groceries for her when she forgot something she needed to fix dinner. And you know Granny Matilda, Captain Melzer's mother? She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's a week before you left —and we didn't think she remembered you, the way you used to bring wildflowers and butterflies in jars and all sort of little things to help cheer her up, but just yesterday she looked up and said 'where's the little girl who brings the butterflies?' and I almost started crying because she didn't remember your name but she remembered your kindness._

_Jack asks after you almost every day; he's learning how to write cursive in school and he says once he knows how to write 'real well' he will write you a whole letter all by himself so he can show you what a big little brother he's getting to be. He tells everyone at school that his big sister went to live in America so she can learn to be a really great dancer and he says someday he'll go to see you dance on a real stage. Remember that poster you had on your wall of the dancer we watched on TV at the Royal Albert Hall? He asked me if he could have that poster soon after you left and he cut out the figure of you from a photo I took at the last base children's talent show and glued you in the middle of that picture and said someday you'll be there and he'll watch you on stage. He's so proud of you._

_ And so are Art and I. I know you weren't ours, Cam, but we loved you and your Dad as if we really were related. Maybe more; there's a special bond that forms between us military families, especially when we live on overseas bases and don't have a lot of contact with our blood families; I feel closer to you than I do to my own cousins and nieces and nephews. Please, Cammie, I know you're busy, but we haven't heard from you since you moved, you haven't called or written and I worry terribly about you living in the big city with people you hardly even know. Please get in touch with us and let us know how you're doing, even a postcard or a quick note or an email; I'm enclosing our email address here on base so you can reach us that way if you need to. Love, Mama Annie._

Clayton felt dampness in his eyes; he reached up to swipe almost angrily at them. He'd been right when he'd thought that the relationship had been close, and that Cam's aunt and uncle had received letters but never given them to Cam. He wondered how many letters they'd written, how many months they'd tried to reach her. Had they ever gone looking for her? Had they ever had any inkling that something could be wrong, or had they assumed, after a while, that she'd forgotten them? Were they angry now that she seemed to have forgotten them so totally?

"There's a whole stack of them in that trunk, Clayton. And I think they sent a lot more than what's sitting here. Allie and I read some of them and it looks like the only ones that were kept are those that mention people who lived on base, personnel, family members, or that mention features or give some sort of directional reference." Shana's voice broke into his musings. "They didn't forget her, Clayton. They stopped writing because she never wrote back but I'll bet they never forgot her. They loved her."

"There are more of these letters?" Delayed reaction; Clayton was just now absorbing the fact that there were more. "Do any of them mention any possible adoption papers?"

"Come and read them."

When Clayton stepped into the small briefing room Allie had pushed aside all the paperwork with Korean writing on them and had multiple sheets of yellowed paper with faded but still readable print. In English. She looked up when Shana and Clayton stepped in, sniffed, then gave Clayton a watery smile. "You too?"

"I just…couldn't believe it. This was her family, and they never even knew what happened to her." He sat down heavily and stared at the pile of letters.

"Start with this one. This is the oldest letter I can find, it's dated fifteen years ago, probably one of the first letters they sent her." Allie handed him a sheet of paper.

_Cammie, love;_

_ I know you're upset. We are too. Practically everyone here at Osan is unhappy about this, from Base Commander Felton on down to Ensign McAllen. We wanted you to stay with us, we would have_ _loved to adopt you ourselves so you could stay, but the military said since your Dad is dead you can't. We begged, we pleaded, we tried, but it wasn't any use—I know you're upset with us but sweetheart, please understand it wasn't our choice to make._

_ I hope these relatives of your mother's that they found are nice. Most of the Korean women around Osan are nice—remember Yong Soo? She saved apples for you and Jack and she always loved watching you dance? She still saves apples, but now she gives them both to Jack and she tells him to send one to you. _

_ He cries every night. He misses you so much. And without you to fight for him he's getting picked on again. Remember that bully Nate, Lieutenant Rickell's son? You bloodied his nose for him one day when he was picking on Jack for dragging his blanket around with him everywhere—he was nine, I think, and you were six, and Jack was four. He grabbed Jack's Blankie and threatened to throw it in the trashcan, and Jack started crying, and you came around the corner of the school building and you just piled into him. I didn't tell you at the time because you really shouldn't have gotten into a fight, but when your Dad got home that night and I told him he laughed until he cried. But he was proud of you, for standing up to a bully and protecting Jack, and he told me he thought if you ever decided to go into the military you'd make a good soldier._

Despite the grimness of the situation Clayton felt a smile tugging at his lips. "She was fighting for others before she was ten," he said, and passed the letter to Shana for the redhead to read before picking up another sheet of paper.

_Hi, Cammie!_

_ I know we just sent another letter and it's kind of soon for this one, but we wanted to tell you the good news; Uncle Art got a promotion! He's now Senior Master Sergeant of the 51st Fighter wing, Second Battalion—same as your Dad was. When he accepted his promotion from Command Chief Master Sergeant McKewin he mentioned your Dad and there wasn't a dry eye in the auditorium. Master Sergeant Daniel Arlington is remembered with a lot of fondness around the base—you and your dad were both well loved and everyone misses both of you. Base Commander Felton himself asked if we'd heard from you; when we told him you hadn't written us he asked for your address so he could write you too._

_ Please write us. We love you and we really miss you, Cammie, and we're not the only ones. Everyone here asks daily if you've called or written us yet, your dance teacher asked if you've mastered that grand jete yet, and we hate seeing the disappointment in everyone's eyes when we tell them no, we haven't heard from you. Jack told me the other day that your Aunt must be like Rapunzel's witch, keeping you locked up in a tower, and he swore someday he'd be the prince to come rescue you, to climb your tower and let you out. I told him he's being silly, but he still says that you must be a prisoner or you would have written to us already. Even Art thinks maybe something might be wrong; he tried calling the phone number that the military gave us as the contact number to call your Aunt and Uncle, but we called it and the voice that answered said we must have the wrong number and hung up._

_ Sweetie, I understand if you're busy and don't have a lot of time; dancing was always your passion, and we knew that, and now that you're in New York there's got to be tons of things to do, places to visit, friends to hang out with, but please don't hesitate to call or write us. We just want to know you're okay. Please, Cammie. Love, Mama Annie._

"We have to find them. They loved her and they never even knew what happened to her. It's like watching someone you love go off on a mission. She just went MIA and they never heard from her again."

"They deserve to know she's okay, but Allie, do we tell them what really happened? Mama Annie has to be in her early to mid sixties by now—can you imagine what hearing Cam's story is going to do to her? Jack told her that Cam was being held prisoner in a tower…he wasn't far wrong, but the truth is so much worse than that…how do you think she's going to feel when she hears that while she was begging Cam to contact her, Cam wasn't thinking about anything except how to survive the next rape, the next interrogation session? At some point she has to have thought that maybe Jack and Art were right, that maybe something was wrong—how is she going to feel now finding out that her suspicions, and theirs, were correct and that Cam needed help, desperately, and she wasn't there? She's the closest thing Cam's ever had to a mother."

"Knowing is better than not knowing, Shana. And you have to think about what Cam's going to do after we get her out of Miramar and bring her home. She's never going to be the same; she's not going to just pick up where she left off. This is going to leave some deep scars on her soul and I would not blame her if she packed her things, went back to the reservation, and never came out again. It would be a waste—God, I hate just thinking about it—but it would be understandable. Maybe, if we could re-establish connections between Cam and the Hammonds, she'll have somewhere to go where she'll feel 'safe' but still stay connected and we won't lose her entirely."

"I hadn't thought about what we'd do after she got out. I was just really focused on getting her out."Shana sounded chagrinned.

"The important thing is that we not make her feel like she has to stay out of gratitude to us for getting her out. In the big picture, this may be life as usual for us, but it's still just a career for her. She has other options, and for her long-term mental health, she should feel like we're her friends and we'll support whatever she wants to do."

"The court-martial—"

"After what's happened to her in the last month, do you think the court martial even enters the picture? She's maintaining a tenuous grip on reality, fighting to stay anchored when the CPTSD just wants to send her catatonic. Her body is in massive amounts of pain from an infection from a badly-timed surgery, her faith in the government she became a soldier to fight for has been shattered, and everything she knew and was familiar with has been taken from her. Added to that she wasn't really willing to press charges in the first place and I think she might end up feeling a little resentment toward Clayton for pressuring her into testifying."

"Let's just focus on getting her out," Clayton interrupted, sliding his chair back from the table. "Then we'll worry about everything else."


	11. Chapter 53: New Mexico

**Chapter 53: New Mexico**

Shana's words stuck with Clayton for the next few days as he waited for some kind of word from New Mexico that Johnson had gotten Cam out.

He felt intensely guilty. It had been _his_ decision to press charges against Hilton and Broadview; if he hadn't pressured her into going along with it she would never have had to endure that horrible rape and beating at Walker's hands in the gym; and ICE would never have been called—because he was positive that Broadview's call had tipped them off to who Cam was and that she could be here illegally. The military and the government had never questioned Cam's tribal registry and proclaimed Native American heritage—and it had to be an inside job, how else would ICE have known she would be coming out of the hospital that day to arrest her? He remembered Shana informing Mitchell that Cam was going into the city for corrective surgery after the vicious beating and rape she'd taken at Walker's hands, remembered that she'd told them Cam was coming back to base that afternoon and the sessions on Monday would be shorter than usual because of her need to rest and care for herself after surgery. So Broadview would have known where Cam was and when she would be getting out and he would have been able to pass that along to ICE easily.

He would have been worried about the lack of word from Johnson if he didn't have daily emails from Alex that reassured him.

_Remember the first night after we got here, Charlie dressed in regular clothes and said he was going to visit friends on the local reservation? It turns out that he wasn't. He's been spending his nights camping out in the desert by the detainee camp, watching through binoculars for any unusual activity that might signal their attempt to move Cam. I'm a little worried about that too now so we're both spending our nights sitting on a ridge overlooking the camp, watching in shifts. _

_ We're waiting there every day to see her. I haven't even protested when they told us we'd have to see her in the hallway because the rooms were full; at this point I don't dare miss a day. She's dropping weight faster than is healthy; she looks exhausted and she has dark circles around her eyes all the time. They never turn the lights off here, Clayton; they're on 24/7, and it's hard for the detainees to get any sleep. She gets two showers a week for fifteen minutes, and she says they've been told if they take too long they'll be sent to solitary confinement—she's terrified of it now after what happened at Sealview._

_ The nurses here haven't really been monitoring the condition of the surgical site but since there's no doctor on staff here even if there was something wrong they wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Cam says Dr. Rajem wanted the stitches to come out after a couple of weeks, and she says she's filled out the appropriate paperwork and submitted it in order for a trip to an off-camp specialist be allowed, but even I've heard from the other detainees that that can take weeks, maybe months, to be approved. I told her if I have to I'll kick up a fuss—those stitches can't be in there that long, and the body cavity searche don't help—they can be required of her by any camp guard, male or female, anywhere in the building, at any time—at their command she has to take her clothes off and have fingers shoved in her to make sure she's not carrying contraband. They do this after I leave, too, as if they think I'd slip her drugs or something. I wish it were possible to sneak stuff in here—she needs food. According to her, the dinner last night had maggots in it and the detainees were told there was no money to make another meal, so she went hungry, and this morning there wasn't enough for everyone so she's still hungry._

_ Her mental health is deteriorating along with her physical condition. She's so happy to see us when we come, but when the visit's over I can see her reluctance to go back, and I think the guards are being rough on her; she moves slowly because of the pain and the stitches, and we've seen them 'help her along' with little shoves while she's walking. It makes me furious but I don't know what to do. If I make too many waves ICE will find out we're back in touch with her and they'll move her again—she's not the only person here who is a citizen and is just lacking a piece of paper, Cam told me there's another woman here, an older lady, who lost everything during Hurricane Katrina and is in the process of being deported to her mother's country of the Dominican Republic because she can't find the birth certificate that says she was born in New Orleans—one of the buildings that stored paper records from the late 40's was flooded during Katrina and the documentation was destroyed, so she has no way to prove she was born here._

_It's also mid-October now, Clayton, and while this is the New Mexican desert, the days are cooling—slightly—and the nights are downright cold. They get one blanket at night and with her current weight loss and her medical condition, her inability to thermoregulate due to the scarring, she's constantly cold. I tried to take my fatigue top off and pout it over her when we talked this morning because she was shivering, and a guard came at us with a baton and told me it wasn't allowed. I can't even bring her a sweater or a jacket. I understand why the doctor told us that for her, living outside the US is preferable to dying in this camp. If she's here much longer, Clayton, she __**is**__ going to die._

Her nightly emails were all in this same tone for about a week; Cam was there, and she was desperately glad to see them but her physical condition was deteriorating daily, visibly, and Alex was sounding more and more desperate; until finally the following Tuesday her email was different.

_We were talking to Cam when there was a commotion, and two guards came in and grabbed her. I asked them what was going on and they said she was being moved, and Charlie and I both got up and followed them out into the hall; I thought for a moment she was being transferred out and I was going to demand they tell me where they were taking her._

_But to my absolute shock there was Lieutenant General Johnson with a squad of MP's, four of them, and the ICE camp guards handed her over to them without a word. I know Lieutenant General Johnson saw Charlie and I standing there, and I know he recognized me, but to his credit he didn't say anything or indicate he knew us at all. He just turned and left down the hall with Cam shuffling along behind them still in shackles, and he shortened their strides to match hers instead of shoving her around._

_We stood out there and watched them; he demanded that they take Cam's shackles off, that they were completely unnecessary; the deportation camp administrator told him she had a history of violence to guards and because of her CPTSD she was unpredictable. Johnson looked at the man like he was four inches tall and said, 'She's nothing but skin and bones right now. She can barely even walk. If you think four MP's can't handle one starved maltreated soldier, you should check and see if you even have a brain.' And I knew then that he was really pissed, because he doesn't strike me as being the kind of person who would insult someone else like that._

_They took the shackles off and she just looked stunned, she stood there and rubbed her wrists as they released her ankle shackles, then they replaced them with just handcuffs, cuffed her hands in front of her and the MP's helped her climb into the jeep. Helped her, not shoved her like the deportation camp guards did. And they drove off._

_Charlie and I followed them in our rented car; once we were far down the road and out of sight of the camp Johnson stopped and we pulled over. He opened the back door and the MP's let her out, unlocked her handcuffs, and she just stumbled over to Charlie and threw her arms around him and burst into tears. He told me quietly that he was going to take her to Holloman, and then on a transport to Miramar, and he'd let you know tomorrow morning that she was safe at Miramar and settled. He did specify that the rules there are going to apply to her, so she would have to spend the first three days in solitary, but he said he'd talk to the Miramar Brig Warden and make sure that she got extra rations of food and that she'd be under close medical and psych observation and you could come and visit once she was out of solitary and integrated into regular population._

_He'll call you tomorrow morning and let you know how things went. Charlie and I will stay put for right now until you let us know whether you want us to come back to New York or go on to Miramar California and stay on the ground there so she stays in contact. I know the military isn't going to make her disappear like ICE did, but having someone she considers a friend will help her reconnect after being held for so long._

Clayton's heart soared as he typed a quick reply; _Wait in New Mexico. Will send word once I hear from Johnson._ And then he shut down his computer and ran for the small conference room.

Snake Eyes and Shana were there long with Dash and Allie, and they knew it was good news by the broad smile he gave them as he opened the door. "Alex just emailed me. Johnson got her out of ICE detention earlier today. She's on her way to Miramar right now, and Alex said he told her to tell me he'll touch base with me tomorrow."

"Yesss!" Shana cheered, and Clayton slumped into a nearby chair feeling relieved and drained and dryly amused. _Only on _this _base would being sent to military prison be a good thing. During all my years here I have said things I never thought I'd hear myself say, done things I never thought I'd do, but being glad that someone was sent to military prison takes the cake. I hope Allie was right and Miramar's the best place for her while we sort this all out._

"I sent emails to the email addresses in those letters. Every one of them bounced back, I'm assuming they're no longer active after almost ten years. Shana and I spent our free time today sending letters to the various bases whose addresses are given in the letters too; The Hammonds didn't stay at Osan, they were moved to Kunsun AFB shortly after the promotion, then back to Osan. The last letter Cam's Aunt and uncle kept said they were moving back to the States about the time Cam would have turned thirteen or fourteen and it says they were going to an AFB in Nevada. So I wrote a letter there too asking what became of them, if they're still there, or if anyone can provide me with details of what happened to them."

"Keep trying. In the meantime, I'll let you know what Johnson says tomorrow."

"You'd better. She's our friend too." Shana glared at him in mock threat, but the smile on her face was relaxed and happy, and he could see the same relief on Allie's face too. It was a relief he shared, a feeling that Cam was finally out of hostile territory and safe, even though internally he rebelled against the idea that anywhere in the US was 'hostile'; for Cam it had been a nightmare, and he wondered if she expected more neglect and abuse and pain. If she was she was going to be in for a surprise.

Johnson called early the next morning; Hawk had barely gotten comfortable in his desk chair before the vidphone beeped and he saw Johnson in the viewer.

The first thing he noticed, however, was the Lieutenant General's frown. And Hawk knew that when someone at the rank of Lieutenant General frowned, it usually meant heads were going to roll. "I have never in all my life seen anything so shameful," Johnson said grimly, not even bothering to greet Hawk.

Not that Clayton really cared. "What does she look like? Is she all right? Are they taking care of her? She didn't have a flashback, did she?"

"She looks like a concentration camp survivor. Yes, she's all right. Yes, they're taking care of her…taking very good care of her; she's going to spend her first three days at Miramar in Medical instead of in a cell. No, she didn't have a flashback, but she passed out, which was even worse."

"What do you mean, 'she passed out'?"

"You've never been in a military prison, General Abernathy—you've managed to stay squeaky clean, and so has all the soldiers in your unit, although if memory serves you do have a couple of young rebels who came close a few times.

"I brought her into the gates and we were met by one of the intake officers, Lieutenant Michael Rowe. Normally at this point her belongings would be taken, but she literally didn't have anything, not even her fatigues—by the way, you or the personnel you had down there in New Mexico there are going to have to bring her at least two changes of regulation uniform. Yes, I saw Alex Cabot down there but I didn't say anything to her—I figured maybe you might not want anyone to know she was military; she and that Native American man-mountain she had with her were dressed in civilian clothes.

"She was strip searched—don't make that face, General Hawk, it's required and you know we can't change the rules! As they were checking her out one of the doctors asked her about the surgical site—how long ago had she had the surgery, why it was infected—she was very red and swollen, even I could see it was infected and she was in pain. The orange jumpsuit she was wearing and the deportation camp-issued underthings were thrown away right then and there because they weren't fit to wear; Clayton, if those garments had _ever_ been washed I would be much surprised. They weren't clean when they were given to her, I'll bet that's how she got so infected. They gave her a clean jumpsuit to wear, took her fingerprints, then sat down and started to ask her the questions they needed to in order to fill out her DD2711.

"Because of the fact that her papers listed her as an illegal alien, the fact that she could possibly have been brainwashed into spying for a hostile power, the fact that at a previous prison she had been sent to solitary confinement for violence toward confining officers and that if she was found to have been spying, even if you find her adoption papers she'll still be looking at a life sentence at Miramar, her intake score was high enough for them to issue her a blue jumpsuit for a Level 3 confinement, maximum security, even though we all agreed that we would be shocked if she could even make it to the front gate.

"She stated during the intake interview that she had tried to commit suicide once, Hawk, you never told me that. She said she was depressed and started a fire that burned down a house, that was how she got burned, that she didn't want to live anymore. General, I know you want to say something right now but I'm asking you to let me finish speaking then I'll let you explain your side, okay?"

Hawk visibly fought down his impatience and let Johnson go on. "She was asked about her history of violence to a confining authority, and she told us that a friend of hers was attacked in prison and she acted to defend her friend. We were trying to get more details from her, but she was looking increasingly tired and it was decided to take her to a maximum holding cell; based on her answers so far she was a potential danger to guards, had a history of suicide, and was in for some pretty serious charges, so we didn't have a choice. She was told that we'd continue this later, that she could go and rest now, and she said thank you and stood up…and then fell over as she passed out.

"The doctor was called, and he took her to the medical wing. Apparently, the downers that the deportation camp gave her also lowered her blood pressure, to dangerous levels, which was why she passed out. She was also suffering from numerous vitamin deficiencies, and her body was badly infected. The doctor said the stitches already in her body had been in there too long and they were infected, so he started her on a massive dose of antibiotics, intravenous vitamins, and painkillers because we'd just realized that she wasn't shivering because she was cold, she was shaking because she was in pain and trying very hard to control it. The doctor there said he'd never seen anyone come in looking this bad from a prison and when he was told she came in from a deportation camp he swore that camp should be shut down because they were in violation of a lot of human rights laws.

"So anyway, Clayton, that's where she is now, asleep in a hospital bed at Miramar with an IV pumping her full of antibiotics and vitamins and painkillers. She's out of that detainee camp and out of danger—no one at Miramar is going to allow her to remain looking the way she does now. She may be in Level 3 confinement but she's going to be issued triple rations and her physical activity will be limited until she's physically capable of walking once around the exercise yard without passing out or getting out of breath. Food and sleep is what the doctor ordered and she's going to get plenty of it—after the doctor removes those stitches and the infection goes away.

"Now. I want to know everything you know, General Hawk, and I want it now. If there is anything at all that you know could help her or help us understand how she got into this situation, please for God's sake let us know."

Clayton took a deep breath. "I didn't want to tell you all of this before, because Cam herself was so reluctant to tell us. And apparently she didn't want to tell you everything even though it would have helped; I think because she's still afraid of possible consequences, But Johnson, there is nothing you can do to her punitively that could possibly be as bad as what she's already endured."

Johnson stayed silent as Clayton talked. He told Johnson what they'd been able to piece together about Cam's life at Osan, about the letters giving them these little glimpses of a much younger, much happier Cammie Arlington, who ran errands for little old ladies on her bicycle and fought bullies for her father's friend's baby son. About Cam's father dying in some sort of accident, about the attempts everyone had made to get Cam to be able to stay on base with them, about the military eventually finding these two people in New York who said they were relatives of her mother.

About her life in New York, the emotional neglect, the insidious campaign of isolation and withdrawal her Aunt and Uncle subjected her to; about the accident that ended her hopes for a dancing career, breaking both legs; about her time in the hospital recovering; about Cam's uncle attacking her in the car, and when she woke up…

Johnson couldn't help flinching as Clayton outlined what the next three years of her life had been like. Trapped in a concrete cell, her only contact with people who hurt and brutalized and raped her, her growing desperation as she understood that they were never going to let her go, that they would kill her; and that last desperate night when she'd gotten free, doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire. Clayton's voice wasn't quite steady as he told Johnson about Cam waking up in the ruins screaming at the pain in her burned body; about her wandering delirious and in agony until she crossed onto the reservation; how the Iroquois had found her, cared for her, figured out who she was and why they had kept her secret; how they'd accepted her, and finally, the incident that had driven her from the reservation and into the military. How the buried CPTSD had driven her to excel in everything until Clayton had met her in SERE training, until his concern for her, more than just sharpening her skills, his desire for her to be a whole person had finally cracked the wall she'd built around herself and she had started the long journey back to becoming whole again.

"And that was when the court martial, and everything else, finally happened."


	12. Chapter 54: Going To Miramar

**Chapter 54: Going to Miramar**

For long moments after Clayton stopped talking Johnson was silent, tying to absorb the sheer mass of information Hawk had just given him. Finally he spoke, and his voce wasn't quite steady either. "Jesus, Clayton."

"Cam didn't want to tell us about the fire, about her Aunt and Uncle's death. Despite what they'd done to her, the way they tortured and brutalized her and trapped her until she literally could see no other way out but death, she still feels guilty that she killed them. She doesn't know about the journals Allie found, that detail their plans to eventually kill her by selling her to someone who makes snuff films." Johnson flinched in distaste. "She called herself a murderer, that she murdered them."

"She didn't murder them. She survived the only way she could. She reacted in self-defense. If she hadn't killed them they would have killed her, and she never thought about running away, she intended to die in that fire. That she didn't was a miracle—or God's way of saying she didn't deserve to die, that she deserved a shot at a life she'd been locked away from for three years." Johnson's voice was tired. "So that explains the 'yes' to the suicide question. I'll call the Brig Warden and explain later. Now, about the violence to confining authority?"

"Detective Olivia Benson was at Sealview interviewing an inmate when she saw Cam walk by in the hallway. She managed to wrangle an interview with Cam, and during the course of that interview they hugged. One of the guards stepped in, tried to hit Cam with a baton; Olivia protested. He tried to hit Liv. Cam protested. They were in the middle of this altercation when another guard walked in with a taser and hit Liv with it."

"They hit a _cop_ with a _taser_?"

"Some years back Olivia was part of an undercover operation at Sealview investigating allegations that guards were abusing inmates—apparently one of the inmates' daughters who came to visit was raped, that's how Liv got involved. Anyway, the guard came in and tased Liv—Cam took exception to that, yanked the leads out of Liv before Liv got hurt too badly, and then the first guard hit her with another taser. And at that point Liv's partner came in, saw what happened, and got Liv out as they dragged Cam off to solitary for assaulting a guard."

"I hope Liv's okay. I didn't see much of her during Operation White Queen but she struck me as being a tough individual."

"Yeah, she's tough. She spent the night at the hospital for observation, they wanted to make sure she and the baby didn't suffer any ill effects, but she's okay."

"The—wait. Detective Benson is pregnant? Did the guards know this before they tased her?"

"It would have been hard to miss, she's in her second trimester."

Johnson's face broke into a broad smile. "Why Clayton, you old dog, you've been holding out on me!"

And that was when Clayton realized he'd walked right into the verbal trap. "Um…"

"The baby's yours, right?"

"Uh. Yeah."

"Congratulations. I'll make sure to send her a gift. When's she due?"

"Um, December sometime. I'm planning on taking my accrued leave time starting the second week of December to help her with the baby after it comes." Something needed clarifying here. "You're not upset?"

Johnson looked puzzled. "Why?"

"Well…civilians on base, and we're not planning on getting married…"

"You couldn't help the civilians on base thing during Operation White Queen. Both she and Alex had to be kept safe while we dealt with the conspiracy, and they both signed—and have so far kept—the nondisclosure agreements so it doesn't matter. As to not getting married—" His voice changed; he sounded now like an old man, his voice querulous and whining. "I'm an old man and I like the tradition of getting married before the baby-in-the-baby-carriage step, but you young people have new ideas and new ways of doing things, and I'm just an old fogey, so what do I know?"

Clayton tried hard to fight the laugh, and failed. Johnson grinned. "Okay. Well, congratulations on the incipient arrival—do you know yet if you're having a boy or a girl?"

"It's going to be a boy." The thought still sent a warm fuzzy glow around his heart.

"Well, then congratulations. Let me go now, I want to call Miramar back and explain some of Corporal Arlington's answers. They'll probably relax the Level 3 confinement now that they understand the attack and the suicide attempt was provoked. I think we can discount the spying, too; she wasn't spying for them, she was being held captive—Christ."Johnson shuddered. "I can't imagine what that must have been like. Now, as to clearing her of the charges of being 'illegal'—"

"She's not illegal. She's just undocumented." Clayton said sharply. "There's a difference."

"—undocumented, thank you, I like that word better. Yes. Undocumented. Do you have any idea how to get her out of that hole?"

"My Staff Sergeant has been trying to get the Air Force to release Cam's father's service record. She's also been calling every Air Force Base to try and track down the family Cam and her father lived with, Art and Annie Hammond, and a son, Jack Hammond, who would be about twenty-three right now. Annie Hammond took care of Cam while her father was on duty, and all five of them shared house space. The Hammonds tried to write Cam once she got back to New York, but in order to isolate Cam so they could make her disappear they never gave her the letters, and they never mailed the ones she wanted to send the Hammonds. So to them, she went MIA—they simply never knew what happened to her. Finding them is as much to resolve the current situation as it is to bring some closure to the question of what happened to her."

"Clayton, why didn't you bring this to me? I can take this to the Secretary of Defense, and he can order the Air Force to release the records—particularly as it involves clearing an active service member of unfounded charges. You don't have to do everything yourself."

Clayton's mind stumbled over the concept. "Uh, I never…we've always handled all our issues ourselves—Clancy couldn't be bothered—"

"Ah. Clancy. Less said on that subject the better. Participating in the conspiracy to torture and murder an unarmed civilian at the behest of an unscrupulous druglord—never mind." Johnson's tone indicated he didn't mourn the other General at all; Clancy had been taken out by a sniper on his way from the Pentagon to Leavenworth for his part in the conspiracy that left Alex Cabot comatose and near death in Clayton's infirmary. "Let me get off the phone and go call Miramar, then I'll give the Secretary of Defense a call and see what he can do to foster some interagency cooperation. In the meantime, Clayton, get some things together and get down to Miramar. Your soldier needs a full set of general issue items and she is allowed to have a few personal items."

It was going to sound like an odd question, but Clayton had to ask. "Is Cam going to have any free time?"

Johnson looked thoughtful. "She will. Not a lot, maybe an hour or two in the evenings, but yes."

"Is there a gym?"

"Yes, there is."

Now the odd question. "Can I bring her dancing sneakers?"

"Huh?"

"She's an extraordinary dancer, and I know she has to have missed dancing while at Sealview and at the New Mexico deportation camp. Once she's recovered a bit and has her strength back, perhaps she might be allowed to dance in the gym on her free time—for her it's therapeutic, it's the only way she hung onto her sanity during those three years as her aunt and Uncle's captive cash cow."

Johnson winced at Clayton's choice of words. "All right, all right, I'll see what I can do. I'll talk to you later, Clayton."

His next step was to send an email off to Alex. _Cam's safe at Miramar. She's in pretty bad shape—passed out during the intake interview. Stitches infected and the medical staff at Miramar are taking steps to correct that now; she's in medical getting vitamins and painkillers and antibiotics and she's on triple rations because she lost too much weight. I'm going to ask Johnson what we can do to press charges against ICE for their treatment of an active-duty US soldier. In the meantime, Johnson's working on a permanent solution—he's going to talk to the Secretary of Defense and see if the Secretary can foster some interagency cooperation by releasing Cam's Dad's service record and giving us the Hammonds' last known address as a place to start. I'm giving you a choice; you can either sit tight or you can get to Miramar—she is going to be allowed to have visitors, and I'll be there in a few days to bring a full set of general issue items like her uniform and boots and she can also have a few personal items—I'm bringing her dancing sneakers so she can dance again. I'd love to bring her swords but somehow I don't think they'd like that much._

Alex sent a response email that evening. _Clayton; Charlie and I both agreed we'd rather go to Miramar and wait there for Cam to be freed. Call me paranoid, but I still feel like ICE might possibly find a way to get her away from the military and if that happens we'll follow her. _

_ We do have a bit of a confession to make; I know you said to wait here where we were, but Charlie and I packed our things up after Johnson took Cam to Holloman and we went to the northern half of the state, to Charlie's people. I've barely seen him all day today; he's been talking to several members of the tribe and I'm assuming it has a little something to do with the harassment Charlie's experiencing down here. Every time he's not in uniform we get, if not stopped, people give him sidelong glances, hostile looks, outright rudeness. It's unreal, Clayton, it's like Nazi Germany down here for everyone whose skin isn't white or black or who have a different accent. I don't even want to think about what happens to those who don't have tribal registration like Charlie. Charlie might as well pin his tribal registration to his jacket like the Stars of David used to identify Jews in Germany in the late thirties; it would save people looking at us. _

_ I hate it down here and I want to come home, and Charlie feels it too, but we both determined we're not going to leave until we have Cam. So we'll head for California early tomorrow morning._

Clayton turned off his computer, stretched. Good. Cam was safe, Lieutenant General Johnson was working on the problem of finding the Hammonds, Alex and Charlie were in the way to Miramar, and he would meet them there tomorrow.

He closed and locked his office door feeling decidedly more cheerful, strolled down the hallway, and changed to regular clothes in his quarters before heading out to the garage and the Hummer. He wanted to see Liv, give her the good news, and let her know that he would be gone for a couple days but he'd be back, and hopefully it wouldn't take that long to get this worked out and be able to bring Cam home.

"Hi sweetheart," he greeted her when she opened the door to her apartment, and she wrapped her arms tightly around his neck and gave him a big sloppy kiss that intensified and turned deeper as she felt his lips soften in response to her eager greeting. "Whoa," he said finally when they both came up for air. "What was that all about?"

"What, I can't be happy to see you?" she asked him, grinning impishly; he, happy to see her smiling, felt himself grinning back. "I've been stuck in here all day sending my paperwork to Cragen from home and I'm bored."

"Well, in that case, want to go out?"

She grinned. "Sure. Where?"

"Mmm. Our usual. I don't think you want to go anywhere strenuous or busy with that much weight on your feet."

She laughed. "You got that right. Okay. Knickerbocker's. Let me just get changed."

"You look fine," he said, eyeing her up and down. "You don't need to change."

She giggled again. "Trust a man to say that. Just give me a minute." He followed her down the hall to her bedroom, watched as she tossed her closet for some maternity jeans and a loose blouse. "Now I know you didn't come here just to take me out."

He was feeling good, so he couldn't resist teasing her a little. "What, I can't come over just to take my favorite little expectant mother out?"

She turned to look at him, amusement gone. "Clayton, we haven't had a chance to discuss this with all the stuff that's going on right now, but I want to know now where we stand on this."

"Sweetheart. The baby is yours, but he's also mine too. And…seeing how much trouble Cam is in now because her father wasn't listed on the birth certificate—I would like my name on his birth certificate if it's okay with you." He had to try very hard not to look pleading.

"Got it." She said without hesitating, confirming Hawk's suspicion that Cragen had been correct and his hands-off policy had not indeed been okay with her after all.

He took a deep breath. "I have some leave time coming up—actually a lot of leave time accruing—so I decided to make Lieutenant General Johnson happy and take it all at once. I have a month coming up, starting the second week of December through the first week of the new year, and as soon as this thing with Cam wraps up, I want to take you up to Martha's Vineyard with me to meet my parents. I think they should know they're about to have a grandkid—they'd just about given up on having any from me."

"Y-your parents?" she stood there, looking suddenly vulnerable and uncertain. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. They're going to love you," He said it with certainty; his mother was going to love fussing over Liv and the baby. "My father will welcome you with open arms—anyone who could tame his 'wild son' is welcome in his eyes."

"Wild son?" she crossed the room and put her arms around him, hugging him as best she could over the lump sticking out her middle. "You, wild?"

"Um. Less said about that the better." But he knew she'd find out about it anyway, his mother would no doubt trot out every embarrassing story from his childhood for Liv. "Okay. Are you dressed? We'll have dinner, come back, and then I have to get back to base—Johnson got Cam out of ICE detention and she's at Miramar Brig now."

"I know. Alex emailed me."

"So I'm going to lean on my 'command prerogative' and make what's known as a 'command visit'. She needs a set of basic issue fatigues and basic necessities kit, and she's allowed to have a few personal items, so since Johnson told me she's likely going to have an hour or so of free time in the evenings, I wanted to take her dancing sneakers. For her, dancing is therapeutic—I remember the first time I saw her dance was after she'd been locked in her footlocker for almost a full day—so maybe being able to dance will help her regain her emotional equilibrium."

"If she's allowed to have some personal items can you make sure she gets this?" Olivia crossed her bedroom, pulled out a small box from her upper drawer, and tossed it to him. He caught it in midair, stared at it. "What—"

"Doc called Fort Hamilton. They read him off the numbers from the insides of her ballet shoes and I took them to a dance store that caters to Juilliard students. They were able to figure out what make and model those shoes were and give me the same ones. And one of the new detectives at the unit, Amanda Rollins, used to take dance when she was younger and she sewed the ribbons and elastic on."

Clayton opened it, awed. Inside, nestled in white tissue, was a pair of pale pink ballet shoes, ribbons and elastic attached. "Oh. Liv." He got all warm and fuzzy at her thoughtfulness.

"I was going to give them to her in the car on the way back from the hospital. ICE kinda derailed that plan. Oh, and don't forget to ask Shana for Cam's flute. For her, the music is therapeutic too."


	13. Chapter 55: Miramar

**Chapter 55: Miramar**

Clayton had braced himself before walking into Miramar, thinking he was going to run up against the kind of conditions Liv had described at Sealview. To his surprise, however, Naval Consolidated Brig Miramar wasn't as much like a prison as it was an extra-high security military camp. True, it was hard to ignore the razor wire atop the twenty-foot fences, and the half of the population wearing covers also carried heavy armament, but the half of the population that didn't wear covers (prisoners at Miramar weren't allowed to wear their hats, called 'covers' in the military; it might have seemed like a minor difference to most people, but in the military it was a major issue) seemed to be orderly and disciplined and there was very little chatter and noise.

He presented at the entrance, allowed them to check his ID, then submitted gracefully to the patdown search and their search of the bag of things he'd brought for Cam. It was all general issue stuff, except for the pink ballet shoes and the tiny cedar flute Shana got out of Cam's quarters. Those two items brought raised eyebrows from the Tech Sergeant who processed Clayton in, but Clayton decided that the 'General' he'd signed in front of his name in the visitor log was enough to convince the man not to ask. He simply handed the bag back to General Hawk and picked up the phone.

Brig Warden Barr met Hawk at the door and made a come on gesture. "Lieutenant General Johnson told us you would be stopping by to bring her things and also to explain some answers that she gave us that were at odds with what we observed of her personally. If you'd come with me, I'll get you settled in a briefing room and I'll call our Chief Medical Officer and our Chief Mental Health Officer and we'll get this sorted out all at once."

CMO Larry West and CMHO Harry Penn showed up moments later; to Clayton's immense surprise they also came with a female doctor, a petite dark-haired woman who introduced herself as Miramar's OB/GYN Sarah Hopkins. "We have a significant female population, General," Hopkins said briskly to Hawk's questioning look. "Fifteen percent of our brig population is female, and sending them off-base for treatment requires that they get dressed in prison jumpsuits and shackling and that's unnecessarily humiliating and degrading for something simple like a routine exam. It makes more sense to keep me on staff here to handle routine things and minor emergencies, although I will say that in your officer's case we may need to send her off-base for treatment if I can't get a successful handle on the infection. General—how did this happen? I can see the original operation was done by a specialist, but how did she get to the point where she needed that specialist, why wasn't this done back when the fire first burned her, and how did it get so massively infected after she was given instructions to keep the surgery site washed and cleaned daily and a prescription for antibiotics given?"

And so Clayton told them Cam's story again; Osan, New York, her Aunt and Uncle's persecution, the desperation that led her to set fire to their house and try to die in that fire; how she'd survived, wandering the woods delirious and badly burned and in agony until she wandered onto the reservation; how the Iroquois had taken her in, sheltered her, healed her and allowed her to join them. He told them what Jennifer had revealed to them about Adam, reasoning that CMHO Penn might find that relevant to start working on Cam's mental state; told them how he'd met her at SERE training, the events that had happened during the training, the court martial, Walker's brutal rape and beating as an attempt to get Cam to not testify at that court martial; how the medical exam performed after that revealed that certain aspects of Cam's physical condition—namely, her genital deformation—could be corrected; he mentioned that Cam had a growing relationship with one of his soldiers that could possibly have prompted that decision. Harry Penn started taking notes when Clayton was talking, but Clayton didn't ask; save the questions for afterward when he'd told them everything.

He went on to tell them about ICE, about their determination that Cam was illegal ("Undocumented, she's not illegal," to which everyone seated around the table nodded decisively) and their holding her at Sealview. He told them about the incident at Sealview, about Liv being tasered by a guard and Cam stepping in to intervene and being sent to solitary; about her CPTSD flashback while in solitary and the guards inability to understand or deal; about them not giving her time to come out of the flashback and instead strapping her down to a restraint table, sending her catatonic; about them not releasing her to use the bathroom even when it was clear in her catatonic state that she couldn't respond to their asking her if she needed to; about how she'd been left there for so long she'd developed an infection from lying in her own waste. Hopkins, Penn, and West all grimaced in distaste at the callous disregard for her welfare this evinced. Hawk told them how he'd threatened to lodge a complaint against them for their treatment, and how the next time he'd called she was mysteriously not there anymore, how ICE had transferred her out without notifying anyone where they were taking her.

Brig Warden Barr's eyes narrowed at that, but he refrained from speaking as Clayton went on. He told them how ICE had refused to give them any answers, hadn't even called them to let them know where Cam was; how they'd finally gotten a call from Dr. Rajem, half-Navajo himself, how Cam had begged him in Navajo to call Hawk and let him know where she was. About Cam's desperate gladness at seeing Charlie and Alex in New Mexico, about Alex's emails over the last week describing Cam's rapidly deteriorating condition, the urgent need to have her removed from ICE detention, their discovery of the North Korean intelligence papers in Cam's aunt and Uncle's trunk of papers and how they'd leveraged it to get the Army to intervene and have Cam sent to Miramar, "…because it has to be better than ICE detention," he finally finished.

Brig Warden Barr looked troubled and angry. "I can see how Miramar would be preferable to every other place she's been so far. At least here there will be some order, routine, to the day, instead of the chaos and misery she's apparently been experiencing. I knew our government had started to crack down on the illegal immigrant problem, but I always thought illegal was illegal, I never knew that they were picking up people who are simply missing a piece of paper from a file somewhere and incarcerating them in conditions that plainly violate the Geneva Convention. I never knew until now that 'illegal' and 'undocumented' were different things. Jesus, what she went through must have been worse than a POW camp. And as for the SERE training that started all of this—I do think the course is a necessary part of every soldier's training, but to have an instructor allow his personal feelings affect the way he did his job is reprehensible, and I hope after you get Corporal Arlington out that you can re-present the case in front of the military judge for a court-martial."

"We're hoping for that too." Clayton said fervently. "At this point my Staff Sergeant is working with Lieutenant General Johnson to find and get the Air Force to release the service record of Cam's father, Senior Master Sergeant Arlington of the 51st Fighter Wing based at Osan. We're also working on trying to locate some friends of Cam's father's; apparently he shared a four bedroom house at Osan with Arthur and Annie Hammond, and their son Jack and the two children were raised together as almost brother and sister."

"Getting to her medical record," West said, thinking hard. "So she was burned in the fire, and it scarred her body for life. She has an inability to adequately thermoregulate without given climate-appropriate clothing. Because of the damage done to capillaries and blood vessels in the soft tissue on her torso, her other blood vessels had to enlarge in order to provide adequate blood supply to her internal organs, making her much more vulnerable to internal hemorrhaging from impacts to her torso and the scarred portions of her skin. The scars themselves are hypopigmented, meaning there is no color there. Is that about it?"

"Yes," Hawk said, and West nodded to himself, grabbing a pen and a small pad and starting to make notes.

Hopkins spoke. "About her gender-specific infirmities. After the fire when she was with the Iroquois and they were using homeopathic remedies to help her heal, the scar tissue formed over her external genitalia and that was why she had this surgery?"

"Essentially yes. The opening left after the scar tissue formed over her external genitalia was inadequate to allow sexual activity or even adequate…drainage…for normal reproductive functions. She informed my doctors that each period brought horrific cramping pain that would last for a weeks at a time; I think my Doc said that since the opening wasn't large enough to permit normal flow it was getting backed up inside her, would make her prone to vicious cramping and frequent infections as the retained material stagnated inside her body. He originally thought that enlarging the orifice could result in easing some of her symptoms but when he actually looked at her he realized that she had extensive internal scarring that was contributing to her pain as well."

Hopkins was looking through her intake notes. "The surgery she underwent was apparently supposed to fix some of the extensive vaginal abrasions present, and also to remove the scar tissue that sealed the edges of her outer labia together, imprisoning and trapping her inner labia. It would also mean she would once again be able to perform sexually, normally; given what you've said about her developing relationship with one of your soldiers, I will bet that was a strong deciding factor in her decision to undergo this surgery."

Barr frowned. "The fraternization rule…"

"…doesn't apply here, they are both the same pay grade, although the soldier she is developing a friendship with is one rank above her, she is not his immediate subordinate, and he is not her immediate supervisor. And at this point, I don't know if she's possibly been so traumatized by this entire ordeal that she won't just pack up her things and vanish back to the reservation upstate just to get away from all of us. I would hope not; she has extraordinary talents and gifts and it would be a shame to lose that for my team, but even above what I want for my team I want her to do what's best for her and if she decides she doesn't want to stay, I won't force her to. Her health and her sanity are more important."

Harry Penn leaned forward over the table. "So she has CPTSD."

"Yes."

"And you weren't aware of this at the time you met her?"

"I wasn't aware of it until after the SERE training, although there was one moment when she said something during training in a very peculiar tone of voice and then claimed later she didn't remember what she said. When my Doc started to examine her after we got back, before the court martial team arrived on my base, she had a very intense flashback, and two of my officers—Master Sergeant O'Hara and Staff Sergeant Hart-Burnett—managed to reconnect her with reality and get her to calm down. They diagnosed her at that time with PTSD."

"When did you realize she had CPTSD?"

"After Walker attacked her in the gym at my base we questioned him, and that was when he admitted he conspired with Colonel Broadview to disrupt the proceedings, reasoning that if Cam—Corporal Arlington—couldn't testify, the court martial would not be able to proceed. At that time Broadview told Walker that Corporal Arlington—in Walker's own words—'freaked out' when Broadview photographed her nude as part of the Phase One intake process for the SERE Resistance Training Lab. At that time Colonel Broadview identified her as suffering from CPTSD."

"This was in Phase One?"

"That's what Walker said."

"And yet Broadview didn't immediately cease the training and alert the CMO and the CMHO that there was a problem?"

"He did not. He hit her with water from a high-pressure hose which 'snapped her out of it' and continued her training."

"Son of a—" came from Penn and West simultaneously. West subsided, looking angry; Penn cleared his throat and refocused on the notes he'd taken. "So the CPTSD flashback during SERE training came from her recollection of being photographed during her abuse by these pedophiles her Aunt and Uncle 'rented' her to."

"Yes."

"And the CPTSD flashback she had while in solitary confinement at Sealview women's prison is ostensibly related to her three years confinement in that basement by that Aunt and Uncle."

"Jennifer Aiennatha, the medicine woman who treated Cam's injuries after the braves found her trespassing on reservation lands, found the place where Cam's aunt and uncle's house burned down some months after she'd come to live with them. She described for me a wooden trapdoor in the ground that led down into a concrete basement. There was a metal-framed bed bolted to the floor with a blood-stained mattress and heavy leather restraint straps; a barre installed along one wall, and two closets in the other; one didn't have a door, there was a hole in the floor with a toilet seat around it and a shower head sticking out of the wall, and the other one had a door on which they had to break the lock to get open and they saw torture instruments in it, whips and things like that. Jennifer said no one ever wanted to go there again, and they never told Cam they found where she'd been held. They left everything where it was, buried the trapdoor under dirt and rocks and never went back again."

"A barre?" Penn raised an eyebrow.

Clayton smiled for the first time. "A barre. I think I mentioned that she had wanted to become a ballet dancer—she still dances, she's extraordinary, and for her, dancing is a sort of therapy. The first time I ever saw her dance was at Camp Mackall after we got her out of the footlocker Walker and his accomplice locked her in. When she got to my base and found that the female officers at my base had set aside a small private studio to do yoga and meditate and perform physical therapy when they're injured, she worked out when no one would be using the studio and she started using that time to dance, that was when Walker caught her, beat her up, and raped her." He reached into the bag of items he'd brought for Cam, extracted the small shoebox Olivia had given him. "Lieutenant General Johnson said that there was a gym here, and she might have some free time to herself while she was here, so I took a chance and brought this hoping you might allow her to have them." He lifted out one of the tiny ballet shoes. "For her, dancing is therapeutic; her uncle had the barre installed in her concrete basement because he was pleased that she was trying to keep in shape for their 'customers' but she said even though she knew that was what he thought, she couldn't stop dancing. She did her dancing exercises as best she could during the times when there weren't any customers, and she says that for her it was an escape; she could remember happier times and be happy for just a moment and forget where she was and what was happening to her."

Penn took the shoebox from Clayton, looked at the shoes. "I…don't see a reason why she couldn't keep them with her. It might set her up for some teasing from the other inmates here but the guards won't let it get out of hand—"

"I'll see to it personally," Barr growled from where he sat at the head of the table.

"—and the gym is open for an hour every evening, which is when she will have her free time. All right, here's what we'll do. Once she's back on her feet we'll assign her to one of the factories here, some activity for which she might have an interest. Based on the information you've just provided, she'll be downgraded from a Level 3 confinee to a Level 1, with medical and mental health supervision. We'll continue with her counseling for her CPTSD, and we're going to discontinue the ICE detainee camp's practice of prescribing downers. She doesn't need them, and her blood pressure's naturally low anyway; downers, as we witnessed in intake interrogation, drop her blood pressure to dangerously low levels and we don't need her passing out. Besides, meds just mask the problem, they don't help it, and she won't make any progress if she's on meds."

"She likes working with wood." Clayton pulled the slender cedar flute from the bag and held it up. "She made this. Her original one got broken at Camp Mackall, but she had just finished carving this one, helped by the soldier she's developing a relationship with."

Barr took the flute, examining it minutely. "Exquisite carving," he said finally. "I assume you didn't bring this here just for show and tell, you brought it here because you want to know if she can have this too?"

"Yeah, that was sort of my intention."

"I don't see a reason why she couldn't. Go ahead and add it to her list of personal items." Clayton smiled and carefully tucked the cylinder of cedar into the side of the shoebox with Cam's ballet shoes in it just as the briefing room door opened.

A young aide popped his head in and saluted. "Warden Barr, sir…you wanted to be informed if someone asked to see Corporal Arlington? There are two people here, a blond female Private and a big Specialist, asking to see her."

"Private Alex Cabot and Specialist Charlie Ironknife. They've been staying in touch with her while she was held at the New Mexico ICE detainee camp."

"Well, as it is almost 1900, and visiting hours start soon…show them in, let them meet with their commanding officer here, and they can see Corporal Arlington as long as her doctor doesn't mind."

"Not at all. For her right now it'll be therapeutic to her eventual mental recovery. By all means." Penn nodded, and the aide disappeared.


	14. Chapter 56: In The Brig

**Chapter 56: In the Brig**

"General Abernathy."

Hawk nodded to Alex as she came in, stopped just in front of him, and saluted, once, sharply, correctly. _You'd never know from looking at her that she's not actually military. She really went native with us_. "Private Cabot."

And right behind her, dressed in fatigues, was Charlie. "Specialist Ironknife," Hawk nodded to him in turn, then turned to face Warden Barr and Penn, West, and Hopkins. "Private Cabot and Specialist Ironknife went to New Mexico once we got the call from Dr. Rajem informing us of Cam's whereabouts—they've been visiting her as often as they could and watching her to make sure ICE didn't move her before we could…manage other arrangements."

Hopkins looked at Charlie assessingly, as if trying to figure something out, then said quietly, "You're the officer she's developing a relationship with."

Charlie's eyes flicked sideways to meet Clayton's, giving him an I'll-talk-to-you-later look. Clayton shrugged. "Charlie, nothing could be any worse than what she's already gone though. Anything that will help them get started on treating her CPTSD and getting her 'whole' again is a good thing. I'm not keeping any more secrets at this point, she's kept this a secret for five years and it's just done her more harm than good. If we put it all on the table now we can start helping her, really helping her."

Charlie conceded the truth of Hawk's statement with a nod. Then, "Yes," he told Hopkins briefly. "She and I were becoming close."

"And you're sure you're not taking advantage of an emotionally vulnerable woman?"

Charlie drew himself up to his full height, face stony and hard. "I met her when General Hawk brought her back from SERE training injured. I spent time with her during her recovery—I am Navajo, and she is Haudenosaunee—Iroquois—but the culture of our respective tribes is not all that different and spiritual healing is one of the prerogatives of a Navajo medicine man. Her spirit was deeply wounded and I attempted to help her with that using methods that would have been familiar to her; not with white man's words and pills, but with the Ancestors' help and the guidance of the Great Spirit."

"And how did you try to help?" Penn leaned forward. "I'm not being confrontational, I'm interested. Perhaps I can incorporate some of your methods into her treatment, maintain some continuity with her, and get her to trust us enough to open up."

"I sat with her. Talked with her. Asked her questions about what happened, tried to get her to change her way of thinking. She feels intensely guilty about all of this and she is evasive and untruthful when asked because she still feels that there should have been another way, something different she could have done that would have allowed her freedom without killing her aunt and Uncle in the fire."

"She didn't kill them. It was self-defense." Alex interjected.

"But that is not what she believes. She has been raised as an Iroquois child by her father, with all the beliefs and convictions and responsibilities of one of the People. Your white man's words, that she didn't kill anyone and it was excusable by self-defense, is not part of the People's way of thinking, and so she would not be able to accept that.

"In terms of the values and the way that one of the People think, yes, she killed them. She prevented them from exiting a burning house, a fire that she set, and so yes, she killed them. That is the truth as she understands it from the viewpoint of how she was brought up. However, my people acknowledge that there is a difference between killing and murder, and while murder is always wrong, killing is sometimes necessary to preserve life, and this is something she understands from hunting rogue bear on the Iroquois reservation. The rogue bear must be killed lest he become a danger to other humans, and to other bears, for if humans become terrified of all bears there will be a massive hunt and none will survive, even those innocent of wrongdoing. She understood that."

Hawk remembered the one item he would have considered a luxury in Cam's spartan little cabin—the huge bearskin throw across the back of the couch. And he also remembered something else; she'd told them about bear hunts during SERE training. 'If you can get a spear or an arrow through the bear's heart and kill it without the main group needing to resort to gunfire, it's a huge bonus and you get your choice of the parts of the carcass—and you get the fur. It doesn't happen _often_; they move fast for something so big and they can be hard to hit—but it _has_ happened.'

_I'll bet that's where she got that bear fur! She killed one with traditional weapons!_ He remembered her killing the pig, driving the makeshift spear straight through the animal; he'd been too worried about her survival at the time to notice, but now her tactics made sense knowing she'd killed a bear without a gun. _Jesus. I wonder if Charlie knows about that?_

"Clayton?"

Alex's voice jerked him out of his reverie, and he blinked as he looked up, seeing everyone standing up. "Yes."

"You were kind of not there for a minute. Let's go see Cam." Was that a hint of amusement in Charlie's dark eyes? There was a definite twinkle in Alex's blue ones.

He wasn't sure what to expect of Medical in a brig facility, but there wasn't much to see. It didn't look any different than his own medical lab at base; same machines, same reassuring beep of heart rate, blood pressure, and other monitors.

Seeing Cam was a shock, however. Alex's emails had said that her condition was deteriorating, hence her desperate pleas to Hawk to get her out of the ICE detainee camp, and Johnson had told him that Cam had passed out during the intake interview and that she looked like a concentration camp survivor, but the mental image hadn't quite sunk in; he was still thinking of Cam in a facility like Sealview, and for pity's sake, prisoners didn't leave jail starved and skinny, so there was no reason for him to suspect that Cam was going to look the way she did when he saw her.

Thin. Not emaciated, but she had definitely lost weight and muscle and while she'd had reduced body fat due to the burn scarring, during SERE training she'd had some. That was gone, consumed by her own body in an effort to fight the infection in it and to keep her alive at the same time. He could see now why she'd passed out in intake briefing, and his only wonder was that the brig officials hadn't seen it when she came in and sent her immediately to medical.

Charlie stepped over to her bed quietly, while he and Alex stood back at a respectful distance with Barr and the rest of the brig officials. For someone so big, he could move silently, and Cam didn't open her eyes until she felt his hand touch her arm gently.

She blinked rapidly; her eyes seemed to have trouble focusing, probably due to her malnutrition; then she opened them fully and saw who was standing beside her bed. Happiness transformed her face as she whispered, "Charlie!"

He bent over her, wrapping his arms around her in a tight hug, whispering something quietly into her hair, ignoring the fact that it looked like it hadn't been washed in a week. She hugged him just as tightly back, saying something of her own into his shoulder; Clayton didn't catch the words, but the cadence wasn't familiar and he concluded after a moment that the two were speaking Navajo. Now he suspected that when they'd been sitting around Cam's desk carving their flutes, they'd also been sharing language and culture as well as companionship, and now he knew why Shana hadn't gotten too upset at the wood shavings and sawdust on the floor of Cam's quarters. _She'd love to see this now_, he thought to himself.

But they couldn't keep hugging forever, and Charlie finally disengaged, though he didn't go far; he pulled a chair over from a nearby desk and sat down, still keeping her hand in his. Clayton reflected idly as he stepped up to the bed with Alex and the doctors that Cam's hand was absolutely dwarfed by Charlie's large, calloused ones, hands that Clayton had seen could snap bone; but he held hers like she was made of fragile, spun glass, gentle and protective. Hawk had known there was this side to Charlie, but the big Navajo didn't show it that often. Not that there were many opportunities to do so, given their line of work; the Army wasn't known for showing a gentler, softer side.

"Hey. How are you doing?" Clayton asked as he sat on one side of the end of Cam's bed; Alex took the other. The rest of the brig's authority stood back, giving the Joe team a little privacy to talk.

"Tired." Her voice was weak, thready, but her gaze was steady and level. "Lieutenant General Johnson said you managed to arrange for me to come to NavConBrig Miramar instead of the deportation camp?"

"Yes." Hawk took a deep breath. "The official reason is that you could be a liability to the safety and security of the US Armed Forces. Cam, we went upstate to talk to Jennifer and the rest of your tribe, and she told us…she told us that they found the remains of your Aunt and Uncle's cabin not far from the reservation's borders. At the time they went everything was pretty much gone but they found one large trunk, charred on the outside but still intact, and inside were papers covered in Korean writing."

Cam frowned. "I…think I remember them having some kind of large wooden box they kept locked, they'd put papers and stuff in it…the tribe found it?"

"They did, yes, but they didn't know how to tell you. You were, according to Jennifer, still recovering and she didn't want to dredge up more bad memories so she didn't tell you right away…and then the time never seemed right. She kept the trunk at her house, gave it to us when we told her what had happened to you, she said she hoped it might help us help you. Cam, did you know your Aunt and Uncle were North Korean spies?"

"Spies?" Cam sat halfway up, winced in pain, and didn't protest when Charlie firmly but gently pushed her back down. "I…no, I didn't…was that why they kept asking me all those questions about what life was like at Osan? They wanted to know names, who was in charge, the layout of the base, where…" she faltered a moment as she thought hard, and Clayton saw the moment when it all clicked for her. "They asked me where the armory was, where the weapons were kept."

"They asked you?"

"They…I never knew…asked me…" She couldn't even think coherently anymore, her eyes wide with anguish. "They demanded that I tell them everything. It was the only time I can remember when they were really interested in what I was saying, the rest of the time they didn't care if I was even there. Oh God…" She looked at them, eyes wide. "Please…nothing happened at Osan, did it, because of what I told them? Is that why Mama Annie and Uncle Art and Jack stopped writing? Because they were killed?"

Clayton hastened to calm her; getting agitated would probably not be good for her. "No, no, Osan is fine, nothing happened." As far as he knew, although he would have Allie check later to see if anything unusual had happened at the base after Cam had gone to live with her Aunt and Uncle. "Cam, Annie Hammond wrote you for three years, that we know of, after you went to live in New York. We found letters from the Hammonds in that trunk. The only ones that your Aunt and Uncle kept were the ones that talked about people on base, or had any references to directions, but there was enough for us to tell that they wrote you for at least three years. The last letter that was kept was when they said Art Hammond was being transferred from Osan to a stateside base."

"They wrote? Why didn't I ever get them?" It was the cry of a betrayed child finally realizing the full magnitude of what her Aunt and Uncle had conspired to do to her.

"Your Aunt and Uncle never gave them to you. They never told you. From the day you walked in they started a campaign to isolate you and get everyone to forget you so that they could get the information they wanted and so they could exploit you."

"They never sent out my letters to Mama Annie and Jack and Uncle Art." There was a spark of light down inside Cam's eyes. "And I thought Mama Annie was mad at me for choosing to come live in New York so I could dance."

"No. They thought you were too busy to write. They thought you forgot about them. But Jack…one of the letters Annie Hammond wrote that Jack said you wouldn't have just forgotten them, that something must be wrong. He said your Aunt must be like the wicked witch keeping Rapunzel locked in a tower and someday he'd find you and rescue you."

Cam started to laugh even as her eyes teared up. "I used to read him stories at night. That was his favorite, he loved the stories with white knights rescuing pretty princesses. He always wanted to play princess and knight, and even when I told him I wasn't anywhere near pretty enough to be a princess he told me I was still one anyway and he would rescue me." Sorrow took over. "I wonder where he is now."

"Jennifer gave us a DNA sample, and Melinda is having it analyzed. It'll show that you're Iroquois and we'll get that admitted with ICE so we can get you out of here." Hawk soothed her; he didn't want to tell her that they were looking for the Hammonds. If the Hammonds were upset with Cam for not writing, or if something had happened to them, he didn't want Cam to get her hopes up thinking she would see them again. What if they didn't want to? "In the meantime, you have to get better. Rest, eat a lot, get your weight back so you can dance again." He sat the box in her lap.

She opened it…and now the tears flowed down her cheeks. "Clayton…"

He held up his hands. "Uh-uh. Can't blame me for this one. Liv bought them for you when you were in the hospital being operated on—she was going to give them to you in the car on the way home, but ICE sort of derailed that plan."

"I…please tell her…thank you…"

"You'll tell her yourself when you get out of here." He watched as she reached for the second item in the box; the little cedar flute.

"Olivia said she thought it would be therapeutic. Brig warden Barr here says you're allowed to have a few personal things while you're here, and we thought you'd like your dancing shoes, your dancing sneakers, and your flute. I would have brought your swords, but I kinda didn't think that was going to be allowed." He looked at Brig Warden Barr, who shook his head emphatically.

"It's okay. This is…thank you, oh God…" she hadn't stopped crying, but she was smiling through her tears. "Thank you."

"Will you be remaining in California? Or are you and your soldiers going back to your base?" Barr asked Hawk.

"I will be going back to my base but Private Cabot and Specialist Ironknife will be staying here to keep in touch. She has been through hell the last few weeks, isolation in solitary confinement has not done her any favors at all, and I don't want her to feel isolated and alone—she needs to feel like she has friends here and having my Private and my Specialist visit here as often as is permitted can only help, and not hurt."

"I agree." Penn said. "She'll have an hour of free time between eighteen hundred and nineteen hundred every day, then visiting hours go on until night work call at twenty-two hundred and lockdown and lights out are at twenty-two-oh-five. Of course, as you mentioned that Private Cabot is also her lawyer, counsel visits are permitted during the day for an hour at a time, so if Private Cabot wants to visit during the day and Specialist Ironknife wants to visit in the evenings, she would have that to look forward to and it would reduce her feelings of loneliness and isolation and disconnection."

Hawk blew out his breath in relief. "Thank you," he said fervently to Barr, West, Penn and Hopkins. "And in the meantime she'll continue to get medical and psych care and counseling."

"Absolutely. We aren't barbarians. We understand the only reason she's here is because ICE's missing a damn piece of paper, and we also understand that by their orders we can't let her go until she's cleared, but we will maintain autonomy over our inmates and our personnel and our decisions as to her activity level and confinement level are ours to make and not ICE's to dictate. If they want to protest let them… I'll be only too happy to counter-protest with the evidence we currently have of her maltreatment." The tone of his voice left no doubt how he would like that scenario to play out.


	15. Chapter 57: The Hammonds

**Chapter 57: The Hammonds**

"How are we doing?"

Allie sighed as she looked at Clayton over the top of the paper she held. "Clayton, you have walked in here four times a day for the last week and asked us the same question. We've told you we're stuck. You've been in here twice already this morning, and I hate to tell you this but the answer's still the same. We haven't made any progress in getting Cam out of detention." She put the paper down. "So while we're on that subject, let me ask you. How is she doing?"

And he could answer that positively, thanks to the emails that Alex, Charlie, and even Cam was now sending him. "She's recovered enough for them to release her to light duty. She's up at first call at oh-five-hundred and gets her cell straightened up and inspected by oh-five-thirty, first work call is at oh-six-fifty, lunch at eleven-fifty-five, afternoon work call at thirteen hundred. She's released from work at fifteen hundred because she's pretty exhausted by then, she has a nap and a visit with Alex, then to her cell at sixteen hundred to clean up before dinner call at sixteen twenty-five. After she's done dinner she reports to medical so they can check her progress and she gets an hour session with psychologist Harry Penn. This lets out at activity call at eighteen hundred, and she usually puts on her ballet shoes and spends half an hour stretching, then half an hour dancing, and," Hawk grinned broadly, "Barr said that her dancing has become the high point to the evening. The other inmates will sit back against the wall and just watch, guards all want to be in the gym at that moment for the same reason. She's still recovering and she gets tired easily, but he says he can see that she's an extraordinary dancer and she's working very hard to get her flexibility and range of motion back and she's beautiful to watch.

"Penn watched her a few times and said he can see that she's visibly relaxing as she dances; that's why he scheduled her counseling sessions for the evening. Being able to dance after he's just put her through another emotionally stressful session helps her regain control of her emotions and when Charlie comes at nineteen hundred, she goes to the visitation room with her flute. He said they will sometimes spend the whole time talking, but lately they've been spending half the time talking and the other half of the time playing their flutes—Charlie had his with him, and he brings it, and Penn says the music they make together is incredible, whether he's playing and she's singing or she's playing and he's singing. Penn also says she's tired but relaxed afterward and when she goes to her cell, she has less energy to fight the counseling he's putting her through and is more inclined to just sit there and think objectively about what he's told her and come to her own conclusions."

"Shana and I did that. After we worked her through another session Scarlett would drill her in sword basics and self defense, and after she'd worked through her initial anger, Shana would bring her twin swords out and she and Cam would practice sword-dancing."

"Shana's already an expert swordswoman."

"Shana is an excellent crossbowman. Shana is good with swords because Snake Eyes works with her but she doesn't have nearly the kind of control that he does with them, which fact he is constantly reminding her of, sometimes painfully, with the flat side of his blade," Shana had come into the room behind Hawk carrying a pile of mail and envelopes and heard his last sentence. "And Shana found out that the kind of muscular control required to draw and swing a sword gracefully in time to music, particularly slow music, is an excellent way to fine-tune her muscular coordination."

"I thought you were supposed to be teaching her."

"It's a poor teacher who doesn't also learn from the student at the same time she teaches," Shana said tartly as she put one stack of envelopes down and retained a large manila one in her right hand. "Hey Allie, I think this is Francis Arlington's personnel file!"

"Cam's Dad?" Allie lunged forward over the table, grabbing for the envelope with one hand even as she grabbed for a letter opener with the other. She slit the envelope quickly, eagerly, and she and Shana both pulled apart the file, looking at every piece of paper in it for Cam's name and anything with the ICE stamp on it.

"Here's the original application for naturalization for an overseas dependent," Allie said presently, setting aside one sheet of paper. "And there's a copy of her birth certificate, but he's not listed on it as her father. And that's it. Damn it!" She slammed both hands down on the table, frustration written all over her. "I was so sure it would be here!"

"The Air Force wouldn't have brought her back to the States after her Dad died if they didn't have proof that she was indeed his child, so there has to be something out there somewhere. But where?" Scarlett made a sound of frustration and reached for the pile of mail again, sorting through the white envelopes. "Hey Clayton. There's an envelope here addressed to Fort Wadsworth Base Commander."

"Huh?" Clayton came around the table to pick up the envelope.

Because of the classified nature of Joe base, any official mail he got as a commanding officer was usually forwarded to him from Fort Hamilton. However, for private correspondence he usually used Fort Wadsworth's Post office box, and that was the destination address for this envelope.

He ripped it open and read the few lines on the single sheet of paper. "Arthur, Annie, and Jack Hammond's last known address was at 305 Keith Ave, Pacifica, California; they were listed as living here while Art Hammond was assigned to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California; he retired from this post about two years ago. Their last known phone number was 555-0690. Hope this helps." The letter was signed 'Command Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, Travis Air Force Base, Fairfield, CA."

A loud whoop caught Clayton's attention, and he turned to see Shana grinning from ear to ear. "We found them!"

"Hey." He hated to put a damper on Shana's enthusiasm but he didn't want to get her hopes up. "Travis AFB says this is his last known address; he retired two years ago and they could have moved by then."

"The only way we'll know is if we actually call them, right?" Shana gestured expectantly to the phone sitting in the middle of the massive sea of paperwork spread out all over the table. "So call already!"

He balked. "Maybe you should."

"He's a senior member of the Air Force, Clayton, I'm a lowly Army Staff Sergeant. You call." Allie handed him the phone receiver.

He stared at it for a moment, hesitant. He could feel a little of their excitement, but he didn't want to get his hopes up; he was expecting this to be the wrong number. It couldn't be this easy, could it?

"There's only one way to find out," Shana could read the thoughts flitting through his mind from the expression on his face. "Clayton, the longer you agonize over it, the more time it'll take to get Cam out of detention."

That decided him. They had to get Cam out. His finger moved on the buttons and he hit the speaker option so Shana and Allie would be able to hear this too.

Silence for a moment as the call was connected across the country. He could hear Allie and Shana unconsciously holding their breath; the room was silent. Then it rang.

"The number's working so it hasn't been disconnected." But was it the Hammonds' number?

A second ring. And a third. A fourth. And then someone picked up on the fifth ring. "Hello?" An older voice. Female.

He saw the excitement, the dawning hope, on Allie's face as he asked politely, fingers crossed, "Is this the residence of Arthur, Annie, and Jack Hammond?"

"Yes, I'm Annie Hammond."

Shana's jubilant whoop was the next thing to be heard in that room, followed by Allie's relieved laughing. Hawk himself was grinning fit to burst but he decided he'd better say something before Annie Hammond thought it was a prank call and hung up. "Is your husband Arthur Hammond, former Air Force, stationed once at Osan Air Force Base in Korea? And did he have a friend, an Iroquois tribe member Francis Arlington, and a little daughter named Cameron, Cam Arlington?"

"Yes, that's Arthur. He's not home right now. Um… Can I ask what this is about?"

Shana and Allie sat down at the table, and Hawk did too. "This is about Cam Arlington."

Silence for a long moment. Then, very softly, "Cam Arlington went stateside to live in New York after her father died. We never heard from her again."

"There's a reason for that, a long story. But we're calling because of an urgent matter; Mrs. Hammond, did Cam's father ever formally adopt her?"

"Of course he did. It was the only way he could have gotten papers for her to go stateside." The voice sounded puzzled.

"Do you know where that paper is, what jurisdiction it was filed under?"

"Yes I do, but first I want to know who you are and why you're calling asking these questions about that little girl." A slight defensive note, the sound of a mother objecting to strangers asking about her child; Clayton figured he was right and they had never forgotten her, never stopped thinking about her.

"Oh my God. I never…I'm sorry, Mrs. Hammond. General Clayton Abernathy, US Army."

"Master Sergeant Shana O'Hara, US Army." Scarlett spoke from where she sat at the end of the table.

"Staff Sergeant Alison Hart-Burnett, US Army."

"Why is the Army calling about Cammie?"

Hawk sighed. "Cam is in a little bit of trouble right now, Mrs. Hammond, and we were hoping you might be able to help us figure this out."

"Trouble? What kind of trouble?" Sharply.

Hawk decided to be blunt. "Cam will be deported back to Korea unless we can find evidence that she is legally Francis Arlington's daughter."

"Deported?" a new voice, male, young. "What do you mean, deported? Cammie's half Iroquois through her father, you can tell that just by looking at her. She even looks like him. How can she be deported?"

"And you are?" Clayton asked the voice.

"Jack Hammond. Cammie was my big sister in all but blood. She never wrote to us after she moved but I knew she had to be out there somewhere." But the young man's voice had a hard edge to it. "So now she needs help and she comes running back, after she's made it clear she didn't want to have anything to do with us after she moved stateside?"

"Cam never forgot you. Any of you. She looks back on her time with you at Osan as the happiest she's ever been and she never, ever stopped thinking about you. Her aunt and uncle deliberately didn't give her your letters and never sent you the letters she wrote you in an attempt to cut her off and isolate her."

"Why? Why would they do that?"

Clayton took a deep breath. "Cam's Aunt and Uncle systematically cut her off from you, from her friends, from everyone who might be able to help her, shipped her upstate and kept her locked in a basement for three years so they could produce child porn with her as their subject."

There was a soft, strangled sound from the other end; Annie's voice. And then they heard Jack. "Mom. Mom, it's okay. Sit down. Sit down. Dad!" and a moment later he was back by the phone. "I want you to tell my Dad what you just told me. God help you if you're lying and this is a prank call, because Dad's going to be furious. I'm putting you on speaker."

Moments later a new voice. "Arthur Hammond, Air Force, retired. What's this I hear about you bringing up Cam's name after all these years?"

"General Clayton Abernathy, United States Army. I'm Corporal Cameron Arlington's commanding officer up here in New York. She's in a bit of trouble and I was hoping you could help me get her out of it."

"She never called. Never wrote. Not even an email. What makes you think we'll help you?"

"Because your family is the closest thing Cam ever had to a real one and because you still care about her. And because she never stopped thinking of you, ever. She couldn't write because her aunt and uncle kept her captive, locked away from the world in a basement for three years so they could produce child porn with her as their subject."

"I…child porn?"

"Her aunt and uncle 'rented' her out to a series of progressively more and more violent pedophiles who systematically hurt and exploited her until she saw no other way out but death. She set fire to the house and tried to die in it, it was a miracle that she didn't."

"Cammie. Our Cammie." Shock softened Arthur Hammond's voice. "I can't believe—see here, how do I know this isn't some vicious prank?"

Clayton searched his memory for every last bit of information Cam had ever told him. "You were Uncle Art, and your wife was Mama Annie, Jack was Cam's little brother in every way that counted. You raised her as if she were your own, you and Francis Arlington were very, very close." He thought some more. "Cam used to read fairy tales to Jack when he was little and he thought of himself as the knight, and Cam was the princess he would rescue even though she told him she wasn't pretty enough for a princess. But when he was little, one of the bullies on base, Nate, threatened to throw Jack's Blankie into a trashcan and he started to cry, and Cam piled into Nate and bloodied his nose."

"Cammie! My Cammie!" a choked sob from the background. Annie Hammond.

"She's in trouble, and we're trying to get her out of it. ICE picked her up for being illegal because they didn't have a birth certificate with Francis Arlington's name on it for Cameron, and they also don't have a paper that indicates he adopted her and she is legally his. She was arrested by ICE upon leaving Staten Island University Hospital for a relatively minor reconstructive surgical procedure to correct some underlying physical issues left from when she was burned by the fire years ago, and the inhumane conditions in ICE detention exacerbated the complex post traumatic stress disorder caused by her three years imprisonment and exploitation by her aunt and uncle. Because of her mental state she was unable to communicate properly, which led to increasingly more inhumane treatment compounded by the ICE's flagrant violations of civil laws. A team of my people went to western New York, where Cam's official address on file, and we met some members of her tribe. Jennifer Aiennatha, the medicine woman for Cam's tribe, gave us a trunk full of papers that had miraculously escaped burning in the fire that took Cam's aunt and uncle and almost took Cam's life, and the papers we found revealed that Cam's Aunt and Uncle were North Korean, not south Korean, and they had papers marked with North Korea's Intelligence Agency's logo. On the strength of that I was able to pull some strings and get her out of ICE detention. She is now at NavConBrig Miramar, in California, and the brig is better than ICE detention but we still can't get her completely free unless we can get an adoption decree for her. Please tell me that Cam's father got one for her."

"Of course he did." Art sounded matter-of-fact. "Cammie was everything to Francis; his sun, his moon, his reason for living. We knew it, even though it was hard for others to tell—most of the other soldiers on base were shocked that he would take six year old Cammie off-base into the woods on camping trips with only what she could carry in her backpack and no food or water. Some of them thought it was barbaric but she stuck up for him, defended her father, and he told us himself he wanted her to be able to care for herself if she found herself alone. So yes, he did file adoption papers for her even after his paternity test came back that she was conclusively his."

Hawk leaned forward, tense; he could see his own tension mirrored in Shana and Allie's faces. "Do you know where we might be able to find those papers?"

"Sure. Right here. When Francis Arlington died we swore we'd give them to her, but then she moved to New York and we decided to hang onto them until she was settled, then send them over—we didn't wan them to get lost while she was moving. We sent her a letter in new York asking her to confirm the address so we could send it to her but she never did, and we didn't want to risk sending it and having it disappear, so we just kept it."

"I need it. I need that paper to get Cam out of Miramar. Please send me the document—"

"No." Jack's voice this time. "We live just up the California coast from Miramar. I'm going to drive down there and meet you. I want to know what you say is true, so I'm going into Miramar with you to find her and give it to her myself."


	16. Chapter 58: Jack Hammond

**Chapter 58: Jack Hammond**

Jack Hammond was a tall, handsome young man of twenty-three, with a shock of dark brown curls and bright, summer-sky-blue eyes. Those eyes were dark with suspicion as he watched Clayton walk up to him from the rented car at the foot of the long drive that led up to Miramar's front gate. The soldiers guarding it watched with mild interest at this meeting.

Clayton could see the tension in the young man's shoulders as he came up. "Jack Hammond?" he asked, needlessly, because there wouldn't have been anyone else waiting for him here at ten in the morning.

"General Clayton Abernathy?" The young man held out a hand, smiling politely even though the smile didn't touch his eyes. "You're Cam's commander?"

"Yes. And you're her brother." Clayton smiled warmly.

Jack didn't smile back. "I'm still not convinced this isn't all some elaborate prank. But I'll go along with it for the moment." He eyed the gates of the brig with distaste. "Stuff like this is why I didn't go into the military."

"So what do you do?" Clayton asked as he started up the drive. He'd come up with Alex and Charlie, and the two of them had packed their bags; if he did indeed succeed in getting Cam out of there, he intended to return with her immediately to Joe base. After he took her up the road to see the Hammonds, of course. He kind of had the feeling Annie Hammond wanted to see 'her Cammie', and Clayton suspected 'Cammie' would like to see her 'Mama Annie' too.

"I'm a photographer for one of the big fashion magazines. Still kind of starting out but I'm quickly making a name for myself."

"Your sister is a Ranger. One of the elite 75th Ranger regiment, and she was also posted to a highly-regarded recon detachment before I pulled her for my project."

"Your project?"

"I'm the head of a highly-classified military project. Can't give you all the details, but suffice it to say that I take only the best from all four divisions of the US Armed Forces in a multi-disciplinary unit and they've never let me—or the country—down." He stopped talking as they got to the front gate. "General Hawk to see Brig Warden Barr," he said. "I have a young man here who might have the paperwork we need to get Corporal Arlington out of his brig."

Barr greeted them as they were exiting the visitor's search room. "General Hawk. You said you had proof?"

Clayton gestured to Jack Hammond. The young man opened his backpack and took out a folder, which he opened and extracted a sheet of paper. Clayton took one look at it as Hammond passed it to him, and knew it was what they had been looking for.

"By order of this court it is hereby adjudged, ordered and decreed that Cameron Heather Arlington is the lawfully adopted child of Francis Charles Arlington…" Barr's face split into a wide grin. "Congratulations, Clayton, you said you'd get her out of here but I swear I didn't…" he broke off as Jack focused on something just past his shoulder, and he and Clayton both turned to look.

Cam had just come out of one of the factories. It was right about eleven, and he'd heard the lunch call ring out; but while other inmates were rushing across the quad, eager to get to lunch, she had stepped out of the door, tugged the rubber band holding her hair out of her eyes—while not as long as it had been, it was starting to grow back and a slight shagginess was the only reminder of the deplorable incident during SERE training when Broadview had hacked her hair off with a knife. She closed her eyes, turned her face upward toward the sun as she started to gather her hair back up into its ponytail.

"Cam…" Jack froze, staring at her like he'd seen a ghost. "Cam. Oh God it is, it's Cam. Cam! CAM! _**CAM!"**_ Forgetting everything, he dropped his backpack on the ground and ran toward her.

Around the fences, guards snapped to attention, rifles at the ready, but Barr held up a hand and they subsided, still tense but holding their fire. Jack didn't care; Hawk wondered if he'd even noticed as he flew across the large empty exercise yard, screaming Cam's name.

Cam squinted against the sun, snapping to attention at the sound of her name, then she shaded her eyes and looked closely at the figure running toward her. And suddenly she too was running, forgetting decorum, forgetting the guards and her own physical frailty as she ran, and Clayton heard her answering scream. "_**JACK!**_"

The two met in the middle of the exercise yard, and Clayton winced at the thought of the jarring she must have taken when her still-too-thin body impacted with Jack Hammond's solid, muscled frame. Neither one seemed to notice, however; his arms were wrapped around her, and she was clutching him tight, and even though it had been fifteen years since they'd last seen each other, more than half Jack Hammond's life, he had seen her, recognized her, and she had seen and recognized him, and Clayton could hear her crying as she clutched him.

"Who is he? Her long lost brother or something?" Barr shaded his eyes against the noonday sun, watching as the hugging and crying went on as if it would never stop.

Clayton had to swallow the hard lump in his throat in order to get his next words out; he had never seen Cam so happy, not even when she was dancing. "Yes. Yes he is. She hasn't seen him since she had to leave Osan fifteen years ago."

"Well…damn." Barr didn't have words for it. Neither did Clayton.

In contrast to the long, absurdly complicated road that had gotten Cam to Miramar, getting her out was absurdly easy. Barr made several copies of the adoption paper, one to go into her personnel file, one to forward to ICE, and Clayton signed the line for her release.

And just like that, she was free to go.

He carried her bag with her general issue things in it, making sure her ballet shoes and her flute were safely tucked inside, then they all headed out the front gates of the brig. By now the initial shock of seeing Jack again had worn off, and she looked suddenly exhausted, reminding Hawk that she was still fragile, still recovering. But the hug she gave Alex was warm, and the long, happy kiss she and Charlie shared was enthusiastic enough for Hawk to turn pink and Alex to giggle behind her hand. He was forcibly reminded of Shana's anticipatory words about Charlie and Cam hopping into the sack, and while he quietly rolled his eyes inwardly at the complication of yet another couple on his base he was glad that Cam had found someone she was apparently happy with—and who was apparently happy with her.

"All right," he cleared his throat delicately. Not that he wanted to interrupt this, but they did have to get going. "Cam, you're getting in Jack's car. I'll ride with Charlie and Alex because I'm sure you two have some catching up to do without us military types horning in. Jack, you're going to lead the way back to your place—I'm sure your Mom and Dad are going to want to see Cam, and I'm sure she'd like to see them too. When we're done Charlie, Alex, Cam and I will take the rented car to Travis Air Force Base—they'll make sure the car gets back to the rental agency, and we can catch a transport heading back east to Fort Hamilton."

"Uncle Art and Mama Annie live close to here? I can see them?" Cam wasted no time getting into Jack's car.

On the hour and a half drive from Miramar up the coast to Arthur and Annie's place, Hawk filled Alex and Charlie in on what had happened till then. Alex's eyes weren't quite dry as he told her about Jack and Cam's reunion at Miramar. "And he had the adoption paper. They kept it all these years. Originally they were going to keep it safe until she got to New York, then once they got a letter from her confirming her address they would send her the papers, but she never wrote them back and they never had a confirmed address to send it to. So they just…kept it. I have to give them a huge thanks for keeping it…I don't know if we would have found it any other way."

The Hammonds lived in a lovely little house in Pacifica, a small town situated about ten miles from Travis AFB. Jack had apparently called his parents from the car on the way, because the first thing Clayton saw as they pulled up the driveway were two figures; a tall, lean man with Jack's piercing blue eyes and salt-and-pepper hair; and a shorter, motherly older woman with curly brown hair going to silver. Both Art and Annie Hammond looked anxiously at Jack's car as it pulled up, and Clayton, Alex, and Charlie watched as Cam climbed out.

In contrast to her wildly enthusiastic greeting with Jack, she looked timid, almost afraid as she stood next to the car, one hand on the door handle as if she were going to duck back in at a moment's notice. Art and Annie stood there, staring at her; Clayton saw recognition in their eyes, but he also saw shock there. He didn't blame them. She did look better now, after three weeks in Miramar; they'd fed her, she'd gotten adequate rest and medical attention and counseling, but she still had a ways to go before he would even think about putting her back on active duty with his team; she'd lost a lot of muscle and weight and if she tipped the scales at a hundred now he'd be surprised. He was going to insist Doc put her through a full physical when they got back to base.

"Mama Annie…" Cam finally whispered as she took a few halting steps forward. "I…I'm s-s-sorry…" and suddenly she was crying, and Annie Hammond flew down the driveway to Cam and threw her arms around the younger woman. And then suddenly they were both hugging, kissing, crying, and then Art Hammond was there with his arms around both of them, and Jack joined them, and the three Joes watched quietly from the end of the driveway as the long-lost family reunited again.

It was Art Hammond who finally remembered that there were other people in the world besides the four of them, and he spoke quietly to Annie and Jack, telling them to go inside, then came down to the end of the driveway. "Arthur Hammond, USAF retired," he said, saluting Hawk; Hawk returned the salute. "Come on in. Jack called us on the way home, told us he was bringing you guys with him, so the least we can do is feed you. And after dinner, I want to hear all about what's happened to Cam, not only from her, but from you."

They avoided all conversation about the intervening fifteen years during dinner; the Hammonds kept them all entertained with stories of Cam's childhood at Osan, and Clayton, Alex, and Charlie found themselves laughing heartily more than once at Cam's "Mama Annie, please! Do you _have_ to tell them that?" what Clayton heard was somewhat at odds with the quiet, reserved young woman he'd grown familiar with during SERE training; through the Hammonds' eyes he saw a happy, outgoing, cheerful child, who lived for her dancing and her beloved Papa, who adored the woodscraft skills he taught her as a child of the Haudenosaunee, who loved mischief and lighthearted pranks and was careful never to take it to extremes and felt intense guilt when something she did inadvertently caused someone hardship and pain; about the pranks she and Jack pulled all over base once he'd gotten old enough to be included as her partner in crime.

"Oh, they were terrible," Annie said over a supper of excellent roast beef, done just right; brown on the outside, juicy and tender in the middle; string beans that she told them she'd grown in the garden in the back of the house, and some excellent peach ice cream that she hand-made and that Cam obviously remembered and absolutely adored; she ate more in this one sitting than Hawk could ever remember her eating at once in all the time he'd known her. "There was this one bully, Nate, one of the Airmen's sons; he was quite a bit older than the two of them, and he picked on Jack constantly, I guess just because he could. Anyway, he was starting to take flying lessons, and he had his own little prop plane he was enormously fond of, a little ultralight winged craft with white skin. Cam and Jack sneaked into the hangar one night and painted the whole thing blue and yellow—he was an Oakland Raiders fan, always said that he wanted to paint it black and silver like the Raiders, so Cam and Jack thought it would be funny to paint it in San Diego Chargers colors, blue skin with yellow and white lightning bolts on the sides. Oh he was pissed."

Clayton burst out laughing; he couldn't help it. Courtney's motorcycle at Joe base was painted navy blue and silver for the Dallas Cowboys; he could imagine how pissed she'd be if she suddenly found her beloved motorcycle painted in red and blue for the Houston Texans.

"Everybody already knew we'd done it. Jack and I were the only ones on base who would have. No one else would have had the guts to touch Nate's stuff, he was such a bully, and a couple of airmen gave us high-fives when they saw it," Cam grinned, eyes sparkling as she remembered; Clayton had never seen her enjoying herself so much, seen her so obviously happy.

Arthur took up the story. "However, Base Commander Felton couldn't let that go. We could see his reluctance, though, when he handed Cam and Jack paintbrushes and white paint and told them to repaint Nate's plane white again."

"Repainting it white was a lot harder than painting it in color," Cam said ruefully now, licking the last of the peach ice cream from her spoon and sitting back with a sigh."But it was fun. And the Airmen kinda helped too."

"They weren't supposed to help you. You did it yourself, you were supposed to fix it yourself."

Cam squirmed a little, and Hawk had to hide a smile; Courtney did the same thing when he called her and Wayne into his office after a bar crawl that resulted in too much damage. It emphasized the kind of close relationship Cam had with Arthur Hammond, though.

"Any more?" Annie Hammond held up the serving platter, but Clayton, Alex, and Charlie declined.

"All right. Annie, go ahead and cover up the food; don't worry about dishes, we'll do them later. We need to talk now." Arthur led the way into the large, comfortably appointed living room and indicated they should sit. It didn't escape Clayton's notice that Cam chose to sit next to Charlie, or that Charlie quietly took her hand in his and gave it a squeeze; and he also saw Arthur watch Cam and Charlie, and gave Charlie an appraising look. _Checking out your 'daughter's' boyfriend, hmm? I think Cam will be changing her personnel emergency contact forms when we get back to base._ Not that he was unhappy with the idea at all.

Annie came in and sat on Cam's other side, and the lightheartedness of the supper conversation disappeared as Arthur asked Cam, gently, if she could tell them about everything that happened to her since she left Osan fifteen years earlier. "And don't sugarcoat it," he said to her firmly. "Don't try to gloss over anything, don't try to hold anything back because you think we might not want to know. Your father was my friend, you are the closest thing Annie and I have ever had to a daughter. You're Jack's sister in every way that counts, and if you want us to help you, we need to know everything."

"You're…not going to like some of it," Cam faltered uncertainly, but Art shook his head.

"I know I'm not going to like a lot of it. Doesn't mean I don't still have to hear it."

And so Cam started talking.

She obeyed Arthur Hammond's instructions not to sugarcoat anything, and Clayton now sat silent as she told them everything. Her Aunt and Uncle's hatred of her supposedly because of her father's heritage; their systematic campaign to cut her off from the world and get everyone to forget she ever existed; the slow withdrawal of her from the dancing career she wanted, longed for, loved; the accident that had broken her legs, the extended the recovery time in the hospital, then at home, her uncle's midnight visits, her Aunt's uncaring attitude.

The attack in the car; and then, when she'd woken up in the concrete basement, her confusion at the sudden change in situation, her terror when she finally understood what was happening to her and what they wanted from her. For the first time Clayton heard about what that first one had been like, that last irrevocable blow that took her childhood away from her forever when she'd fought the man she'd been 'rented' out to and he'd beaten her almost unconscious and took from her what should have been hers to give and no one's to take. The three years she'd spent in the basement, three terror-and pain-filled years not knowing if she would survive the next one, or the one after that, unable to even think of a future when she had to focus on surviving the present, clinging to her sanity only through the medium of what little dancing she could do in the concrete basement. Her conviction that they would kill her, her plans to die by her own hand and take them with her so they wouldn't be able to hurt anyone else, do this to anyone else, again.

The fire, the days she'd spent stumbling around Western New York badly burned and in agony; the reservation, the Iroquois. The five years she'd spent with them, working communally, soaking in the peace and comfort of the reservation. Then the dustup with Adam, her broken heart and her need to get away, and her two years in the army, first as a Ranger, the decision to try for posting with an RRD, going to SERE-C school and meeting Clayton.


	17. Chapter 59: Moonlit Dance

**Chapter 59: Moonlit Dance **

And now Clayton, seeing how exhausted she looked and knowing it had been a long day, took up the thread of the story. He told them, in a voice with a hard edge in it, about what had happened at SERE training; Broadview's blatant prejudice, what he'd put Cam through, her near-brush with death, their decision to escape into the hurricane rather than let Broadview torment Cam anymore. The two days of the hurricane had been among the longest in his life; he told them that, then about Charlie and Allie finding them, returning them, his decision to transfer Cam into his project and to file charges against Broadview. The court-martial proceedings, then Walker's vicious, brutal attack, Broadview's complicity in the conspiracy, Clayton's suspicion that Broadview had been the one to tip off ICE in the parking lot outside Staten Island University Hospital after the reconstructive surgery.

She told them then, in a flat monotone, about Sealview and the incident there; how she'd sprung to Liv's defense and was tased for it; her CPTSD flashback and stint in solitary, waking up in the middle of the night and being hurried out to a waiting plane, getting off and finding herself in the middle of the desert. For the first time Clayton and the others heard her voice break as she desperately tried to figure out how to contact them her fear that they would never find her and she would be alone, and then—oh, relief!—they had taken her to a medical clinic and the doctor had spoken Navajo. And she had begged him to call Clayton, gave him the number, trying to be careful that the guards never suspected they were discussing something other than her condition.

She'd tried not to get her hopes up, but life was intolerable, and she couldn't help but hope that her message had gotten out. She'd waited two days, waited for something to happen, and then Alex and Charlie came, and she had never been so happy to see anyone in her life. Seeing a familiar face, feeling Charlie's arms around her, had been the most wonderful feeling in the world. And they had made frequent visits over the next week, until Lieutenant General Johnson had come for her and they had gotten her out of ICE detention and brought her to Miramar.

_Allie was right,_ Clayton thought as she went on with her story, her voice now bright and cheerful. _Miramar was the best place for her._ After the chaos and disorder of the deportation camp, after the misery of solitary confinement at Sealview and the lack of attention and consideration to her physical and mental state, the calm order at Miramar, the days carved up into strictly-regimented chunks, each block of time with its own allotted task—it had been a welcome change from the blur of pain and confusion that had characterized her time in custody so far.

Triple rations, with the correspondingly high calorie count, had given her back her strength, the careful attention to her medical needs had resulted in finally successfully beating the infection that she'd struggled with since Sealview, and the time spent with Penn, Miramar's psych specialist, had helped her gain some kind of perspective on everything, helped her regain some control over her mental state and start working on the trauma that had caused her CPTSD. "Allie and Shana were doing the right thing," Cam told Clayton now, quietly. "Talking me through it and trying to get me to see that none of it was my fault. The Miramar doctor was doing the same thing. You know, when I told him that after one of Allie and Shana's counseling sessions Shana would take me out and we'd work with swords until I was exhausted so I could work through the anger—that was when he started timing our sessions so that I'd be able to use my free time to dance in order to blow off steam."

There was absolute silence in the living room by the time she finished as every one of her listeners tried to come to grips with what she'd told them, what they'd learned. Clayton studied the Hammonds, sitting silent in their chairs; Art and Jack, looking surprised and shocked and horrified, Annie leaning against Art Hammond's shoulder with silent tears running down her face. It was her voice that finally broke the silence. "I never knew," she whispered. "Cammie, we never knew. I'm so sorry, baby…here I thought you'd forgotten us, that you didn't care about us anymore, and I was angry with you for not keeping in touch…and all the time you were…you were…" she choked.

Cam wrapped her arms around Annie, and both women dissolved into tears.

By the time they all got through the emotional backlash of the evening, it was almost midnight, and the Hammonds absolutely insisted that they not leave. "It's the middle of the night. Travis isn't going to like having to admit visitors in the middle of the night, and we have a couple of spare bedrooms," Art Hammond pointed out. "General Abernathy, you can have the south bedroom; Cam, you can have the north one. I can set up an air mattress for Private Cabot and Specialist Ironknife in those respective rooms—you're soldiers, so I'm sure you're used to bunking down together—"

"Uncle Art? Um…if you still have a camp tent…can I sleep outside in the tent?" Cam asked.

They stared at her. "Cammie…" Art started helplessly, but she shook her head.

"I…I spent too much time locked up. In solitary, the cells have no windows, and the door is heavy and bolted. I kept feeling like the walls were closing in on me, like the walls in the basement when my Aunt and Uncle were…keeping me captive." She looked at him pleadingly. "I want to be able to see the sky, the stars, feel the breeze and smell clean air. Please, Uncle Art."

Her words cut though Clayton like a knife. Joe base was underground; the quarters, while much more generously sized than most, didn't have windows, didn't let in natural light. She hadn't complained when she was at base, but if she'd developed claustrophobia during her stint in solitary, it was going to be a problem at his base. She might not be able to live there and be a functioning member of his team.

_I'll have to talk to Shana and Allie about this. If she's claustrophobic I may not be able to have her on my team. We'll have to see how she does when we're back at base._ And then he was snapped out of his reverie as he heard Charlie say, "I'll share the tent with her."

He started at Charlie, jaw dropping. _Holy cow. Shana and Allie were right. Charlie's developed feelings for her_. He remembered Allie saying that Charlie and Cam would be hopping in the sack by Christmas; but that had been during the court martial, before everything else that had happened, and Clayton wondered now if Charlie had thought that maybe Cam would need some time to decompress, to mentally recover, from what happened. He couldn't just expect her to pick up where they'd left off. And Charlie also knew, now, about Adam, about Cam's broken heart. Granted, two years was a bit of time for a 'rebound' relationship, but…

"All right. Have it your way. You and your Dad liked sleeping in tents, if I remember correctly." Art sighed. "Jack, if you could get the camp tent out of the attic and get that set up…"

In a surprisingly short amount of time they were all settled; Clayton stretched out on the spare bed with a sigh and closed his eyes. He'd have to sleep in his fatigues since he hadn't planned for an overnight trip, and anyway, it was midnight, and they would be leaving at six or seven in the morning; he could deal with this for one night.

He was almost asleep when he heard the faintest whisper of sound. He opened his eyes, listened. After a moment, it repeated, and he identified it as flute music, coming from outside his window, and he climbed out of bed to look out.

The moon was nearly full, and it turned the grass of the Hammonds' backyard to silver. Cam was out there now, dancing, but it wasn't the ballet Clayton was used to seeing from her. This looked like a Native American dance, stomping, shuffling, hand gestures that still looked graceful coming from her, and Charlie sat on the ground by the front of the tent, playing his flute as she danced. It was something wholly and completely unexpected, but at the same time harmonious—like these two belonged together, dancing to flute music under silver moonlight.

Charlie put the flute down unexpectedly, and got up to join her. Their movements were perfectly coordinated, both of them knowing and performing the steps of what seemed to Clayton like an intricate dance, and he remembered the last time he'd seen something like this. Shana, in the gym with Snake Eyes, stretching and performing katas together. Smooth, fluid movements, one person in two bodies, perfect mirrors of each other.

He heard a sound at his door, and he turned to see Alex slipping in. "I wasn't sure if you were still awake. I wanted you to see that."

"That?" He turned his attention back to the two dancing figures. "Yeah, I'm seeing that." Alex joined him at the window, and together both of them looked out.

"What are you going to do?" her voice was a mere whisper in the darkness.

"I'm going to remind him what Cam's been through. I'm going to remind him of that failed 'marriage proposal' she made to the Iroquois boy back on the reservation Jennifer Aiennatha told us about. I'm going to warn him she might still be experiencing some emotional backlash from what's been going on the last few months."

"You think he hasn't thought this through?" Alex leaned against the windowsill and folded her arms, drawing Clayton's attention. "Clayton, Charlie isn't really one to talk about his feelings much, but I've seen the way he's acted throughout this whole mess. You have to remember I've been with him for the last few weeks, first in New Mexico, then down here in Miramar. Getting to her, seeing her, having her know he was here, has been his first and only priority since she disappeared, he lives for the time when he can see her again. I did write you that the nights in New Mexico he would tell me he was going to visit some friends in the area, some distant tribe members, and what he was actually doing was sitting on a hill overlooking the detainee camp and making sure they didn't move her again. When he went to see her in the evenings at Miramar they would sit, talk, or they would play their flutes, or he'd play and she'd dance and sing.

"You know what I think? I think they both know exactly what they're doing. He's in love with her, has been ever since before she disappeared. And I think she's in love with him, that was part of the reason she agreed to undergo that surgery, so love wouldn't be entirely one-sided. I think that if you showed any hint of disapproval, you'll lose them both. I think that, when we get back to base, you should give her some leave time—call it medical if you want—let her go home, regain her equilibrium, let her decide if, after all of this, is the Army really what she wants or does she want a civilian life, a quiet one, on the reservation. And I think Charlie is going to choose to go with her, and I think it's important that you let him go too if that's what he wants."

"It's not like I have any control over what my soldiers do or don't do," he grumped, but he was thinking rather hard about it. Medical leave would give her a chance to decompress—a lot had happened—and decide if she could handle being at Joe base after everything that had happened. He still wasn't sure if she blamed him for what had happened—after all, if he hadn't practically forced her to testify none of this would have happened, and he hadn't yet had a chance to talk to her. Honestly, he wouldn't blame her right now if she hated him—she'd been through more than any one person should ever have to in any one lifetime.

"Actually yes you do. Your soldiers look up to you, Clayton—you're a good man and an excellent leader and your people, Charlie included, recognize that and they would follow you to the ends of the Earth if you asked them too. But I'm going to quote something Liv said to you once; you don't own them. They look to you. They follow you. You're the head of this little military family. They listen to you, even if they end up not liking what you tell them, they acknowledge that you have reasons for saying the things you do and for acting the way you do and when you make a recommendation, they're going to think long and hard about what you've said and why you've said it before they act. But they are also individuals, and for people like Cam and Charlie—the world they came from is so much larger than this military gig. Career soldiers, like you and Flint and Duke—this is it for you guys, this is all you know and all you live for, but for Cam and Charlie—they know there is another life out there, a quiet one on a reservation where they can live ordinary lives and after something traumatic like what happened, even you can see how appealing that life in quiet obscurity must be for someone who's had to endure what Cam's endured."

Clayton nodded reluctantly as the truth sank in. "I understand what you're saying, Alex, I really do. I can't say I'm happy about it, but I guess if they're meant for this life they'll come back if they want it, and if they don't, well…"

"You will have had the good fortune to meet two very extraordinary people."

Clayton nodded. "They are at that. Extraordinary."

"Good." Alex unfolded her arms and took a peek out of the window. "I'm going back to bed—they've gone into the tent for the night, although I sincerely doubt they'll be getting any sleep—and we're going to be on our way home tomorrow." She saw his pained expression. "No, Clayton, they'll probably spend the rest of the night talking. The doctor told Cam she has to take it easy for at least another couple of weeks, so no, they won't be doing what you're thinking." His relief was so patently obvious that she laughed at him as she headed back to the spare room.

Leave-taking in the morning proved almost as stressful as the evening before; Cam and Annie cried like they were saying goodbye forever, even though Cam promised she would call and write and email and stay in touch, and Jack promised her with mock ferocity, real feeling and not-quite-dry eyes that if he went a month without hearing from her again he was going to come find her and rescue her. Cam laughed and hugged him as if she would never let him go as she promised that she'd stay in touch, gave them her address and the base's public phone number, and Clayton promised Arthur that if there was anything they ever needed for Cam again, he needed only to call and Art would get whatever he needed.

And then they were in the car, heading for Travis Air Force base, and it didn't escape Clayton's notice that Cam was pretty quiet all the way there, that she avoided looking into his eyes wherever possible, and her hand remained in Charlie's most of the way there. It was Charlie who helped her out of the car at Travis, who carried her bag onto the aircraft for her, and it wasn't until they were all on the plane that they finally had a chance to talk. Charlie was helping Alex stow their bags in an overhead flight compartment and strapping down the ones that didn't fit and Clayton said to Cam quietly, "Cam, I know you're upset. I know why, and I'm sorry. I never expected it was going to drag out this long, be this complicated, that you would have to go through so much, and I'll understand completely if you never ever want to talk to me again—"

"Hold on," Cam said sharply, and Clayton shut up at the tone in her voice; she sounded like the Cam Arlington he'd met at Fort Bragg that first day. "What makes you think I'm upset with you? Why would I be?"

"Because if I hadn't talked you into testifying, it would never have happened, any of it; Walker would never have hurt you that badly, never have raped you; Broadview would never have called ICE and you wouldn't have had to go through this absolutely deplorable mess over the last few weeks."

Cam leaned forward. "Clayton, first of all, it didn't take much convincing to get me to testify. I wanted to, even though I also knew that my testimony wasn't really necessary. And if I hadn't made that decision, yes, Walker wouldn't have raped me—but I also wouldn't have found out that some of the damage my body took was fixable. I used to avoid closed confined spaces, because they reminded me of the basement. But after sitting in solitary at Sealview for a week, suddenly confined spaces wasn't so bad anymore. I learned to deal with it through continuous exposure, as Dr. Penn back at Miramar explained to me. Yes, I could have done without the detainee camp, but if things hadn't been so horrible there you'd never have been able to get me to Miramar. And you'd never have found Jack and Mama Annie and Uncle Art for me. And that alone…" she swallowed hard, her voice soft, "…that alone was worth everything."

"I'm glad you see it that way, Cam, but the fact remains that my stubbornness cost you a lot. So I have a question for you now; are you sure you want to stay with my project, at my base? The confined spaces, the fact that the quarters don't have windows because we're underground…can you deal with that?"

She was silent for a moment. "Clayton, I don't know. Honestly. I don't know what to think right now, yesterday morning I was getting up and making my bed for morning inspection and thinking I'd be doing the same for the rest of my life. Now suddenly I'm here and I have my family back and I'm free again. Please, just…let me take it all in first."


	18. Chapter 60: Homecoming

**Chapter 60: Homecoming**

Homecoming back at Joe base was an enthusiastic but carefully restrained affair.

Everyone was ecstatic that Cam was back. Allie and Shana and Courtney greeted her with huge hugs and squeals of happiness; Alex and Charlie were welcomed back with equal, though perhaps not quite as loud, enthusiasm. The Girls would have dragged Cam off immediately to debrief her, in the way that only girls can, but Hawk put his foot down; Cam was exhausted although she was trying not to show it out of deference to their enthusiasm; but he knew she and Charlie hadn't had much sleep the night before, and he told both Cam and Charlie to go to the mess hall and help themselves to food, and get some sleep. Both Joes hurried off to do so, and he dragged Alex, Allie, and Shana into his office.

He brought them up to date on what had happened the day before; about Jack, meeting them at Miramar; the way Jack and Cam had recognized each other instantly, even across the years and distance that separated them; taking Cam up the California coast to see the Hammonds, the night they'd spent there. He made them laugh with some of the stories Annie Hammond had told of Cam, growing up at Osan; then he very quietly told them about Cam asking Art Hammond for a tent instead of the spare bedroom.

Allie and Shana understood his concern immediately. "If her experiences at Sealview and the deportation camp give her permanent claustrophobia, Clayton, she might not be able to handle living at this base and working with us."

"I know." He took a deep breath. "I want to fill out the forms that grant her extended medical leave; I think she'll want to go home, to the reservation, decompress and just absorb everything that happened to her." He paused.

"All right, that sounds reasonable." Shana chewed her lower lip. "But I get the feeling there's something more to that?" her voice rose at the end in a question.

Clayton turned to Allie. "Does Charlie have any leave time coming up?"

Instant comprehension. Allie and Shana stared at each other for a few minutes, slow smiles starting across their faces, then Allie cleared her throat. "I think he does, yes."

"I'm going to recommend to him that he escort Cam to her reservation in Western New York."

"In hopes that he'll choose to stay with her." Shana sighed, batted her eyelashes. "Oh how romantic, a little cabin, all alone in the wilds of western New York, right there on the shores of the lake…and winter's coming, so there will be plenty of days when they'll be snowed in, just the two of them, cuddled in bed together snug as a couple of bugs in a rug…"

Clayton blinked. "You don't have a problem with that?"

"Why? Should we?" Shana lost that dreamy look and focused on Clayton. "Allie and I have been subtly working toward that for a while. We agree Cam needs some decompression time, but having Charlie there with her will remind her that there's a base full of people here who care about her and it'll keep us from losing her until she's ready to come back."

Allie nudged Shana with an elbow. "Shana. Clayton's worried that Cam won't come back…and that Charlie will choose to stay with her."

Shana froze. "I…hadn't thought of that," she said finally, reluctantly. "Do you think it's possible she won't?"

"Anything's possible," Alex said from where she'd been sitting quietly. "But if you don't give her the chance, let her go and let her find her own way, you're never going to know if she stayed out of duty or if she stayed because she wanted to. And if she stays out of duty sooner or later it'll affect her work and she'll become hard and bitter and then she won't be the same woman who Clayton dragged here half-alive after SERE training."

"Well…what about the court-martial? She'll have to…" She stopped, because Clayton was shaking his head.

"I made a huge mistake when I pressured her into testifying. She was reluctant and I pushed her and look at what Broadview and Walker did to her. I'm not going to make the same mistake, Shana, she's going to do exactly as much or as little as she really wants to; I'm not going to force her to do anything again.

"When she wakes up I'm going to have Doc give her a full physical. She's pretty close to being completely healed, according to the paperwork Miramar's brig doctor gave me, but I want to make sure. Then I'm going to give her the choice of staying for the court martial or just heading out…and if she chooses to head right out I'll tell her Charlie's going with her. He can make his own decision whether he wants to stay with her or go to his home and visit his people, but at least I will have offered him that choice. I realize that you all have put a lot of time and effort into those charges and preparing for this court-martial, but at this point Cam's health, physical and mental and emotional, is more important than my desire to get the bastards that screwed up her SERE training. The training…after what's happened to her, and after knowing what happened to her when she was young, somehow what happened in SERE training doesn't look so bad. Seriously."

Shana nodded, although she looked clearly reluctant. "Whatever you think best, Clayton. Just…make sure you know there's a very real chance that you're going to lose both of them if you let them go. I saw how close they were getting right before everything happened; Cam told me she'd never known anyone quite like Charlie, the perfect balance between white man's world and the People, as she put it, and she wished she could achieve that balance. "

Allie tilted her head thoughtfully. "Clayton, when you and Charlie went to Western New York to talk to Jennifer Aiennatha, you said Charlie used a word you hadn't heard before to introduce himself to her, and as soon as she heard it her attitude changed. Do you remember what that word was?"

Clayton dug down into his memory, trying to remember what the word had been, what Charlie had said, and he repeated it as best as he could remember it for Allie. "Jennifer smiled after she heard it," he said.

Allie sucked in a breath. "My Navajo is a little rusty and I don't know any Iroquois, but some of the root meanings of the most important words in all native languages are the same. Clayton, he introduced himself to Jennifer Aiennatha as her lover."

"But…but…she hadn't…they hadn't…Cam couldn't…" He couldn't seem to complete a sentence.

"There are other layers of meanings, and without hearing the whole thing just as he said it I can't be sure, but it comes out to 'spirit-lover'. He fell in love with her even before he touched her physically—the implication is there that even if he never gets to physically consummate that relationship he still loves her."

"It seems to have happened very, very suddenly," Clayton shook his head, still stunned. "I…she only met him two months ago when you came to pick us up after the hurricane, and she's barely been here, how could this happen so fast?"

Allie shrugged. "Clayton, I don't know. It just does. One of those weird things that happens with humans, I guess. Um…when I first got here and met Dash, all right, I admit I thought he was a jerk. It was only later as I started to get to know him that I figured out what he was really like and that I liked the man under that flint-hard exterior." She pinned Shana with a hard glare. "And you, sneaking around with Snake Eyes behind Clayton's back. Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?"

"Guilty," But Shana didn't look at all repentant.

There was a tap on the door, and the three of them looked up as Courtney poked her head in the door. "Rec room's off limits for the rest of the night," she said.

"Why?" Clayton asked sharply.

Courtney stepped into the room and he saw she was holding her cell phone. "This is why." She hit a few buttons, cued up a picture on the screen, then passed it to him.

He stared. The picture had been taken in the rec room, he clearly recognized the couch and the low table that held the TV remotes, but it took him a moment to process the two figures lying on that couch. Charlie, stretched out full length on the outside of the couch, left arm hanging off the cushion, knuckles brushing the floor. And beside him, her back to the couch cushions and her cheek pressed to his shoulder, was Cam, lying in a semi-fetal position, tucked securely—'snuggled' was the only word Clayton could come up with for the way she was curled around the big Navajo—with her head resting on his right bicep, the rest of his right arm curled protectively around her shoulders and her own arm resting on his broad chest, and both were sound asleep. And for Charlie, that was quite a feat; normally Courtney would have never been able to sneak into the rec room and photograph him; he'd have woken up at the first sound.

He passed the phone to Allie, who giggled and passed it to Shana, who just stared for a moment, shook her head, and passed it to Alex. Alex smiled at the picture, then said, "Someone really should wake them up and tell them to find a regular bed—they're going to be sore in the morning if they sleep on that couch all night."

Hawk grinned. "Court, please go wake them up and tell them to go to bed. You know if Frank walks in there and sees them like that he'll be tempted to pull a prank of some sort on them and Charlie's reaction won't be pretty."

Courtney lingered. "I hate to disturb them."

"Cover Girl. Now." Just a hint of command.

She stopped lingering.

"I guess that answers that question," Allie sighed and sat back. "Okay. Let me go find out how much leave time Charlie has accumulated, and draw up those forms for Cam's medical leave. I'll talk to Doc and let him know what we discussed, he'll look her over and sign the leave form, and when Charlie and Cam—and you—wake up, you can inform them of their forthcoming involuntary vacation time."

"When I wake up? I'm already awake."

"You and Alex both need to get some sleep. So go." Shana made shooing motions toward both of them. "Both of you are practically asleep on your feet. Go on."

And when he woke up he found himself in the middle of another fiasco.

Courtney had gotten to the rec room a little late; Frank had gotten there first. He'd taken advantage of their deep sleep to quietly drape a shirt printed to look like a black tuxedo over Charlie's chest and a lacy white something-or-other over Cam, then positioned a radio beside the two of them, turned it on to play a wedding march and then snapped a picture just as Charlie and Cam woke up, looking sleepy and confused and bewildered.

The account of what happened after that varied according to who on the base you spoke to but the gist of the story was that Charlie had run through half the base pursuing Frank and swearing blood-feud on his fellow Navajo brother while Cam laughed herself silly with Courtney back in the rec room. Charlie had eventually cornered Frank in the men's locker room just off the gym, and both had emerged soapy and dripping. Cam had laughed at both of them and taken Charlie off to her room, and (according to Courtney) they had finished their nap there.

Now Charlie and Cam sat in front of Hawk's desk, with Shana, Allie and Dash in attendance; as Hawk's second in command Flint had to sit in on these things.

"I want you to take some leave time." Hawk prefaced the discussion with that directive. "No, hear me out," he said when it looked like Cam (damn it, why did the girl have to be quite so stubborn?) was going to argue. "Jennifer Aiennatha told us when you're upset or thinking very hard about something you tend to vanish into the wilderness to live by yourself. According to her that's what you did when Adam Barefoot broke your heart—"

"Charlie told me he knew about that," Cam said quietly, and Hawk just nodded; he already suspected Charlie had told her everything that had happened since she'd been arrested by ICE outside of Staten Island University Hospital, and this just confirmed that suspicion.

"—and even if she hadn't told us about that, I would still have granted you some leave time to decompress. What happened to you both inside and out of ICE detention is more than any one person should have to go through in any one lifetime. Fortunately for us, since we caught Walker actually in commission of a…forbidden act…your testimony is not required and that will be a short court-martial. The charges against Broadview are a little more complicated, but since you never wanted to testify in the first place, after what's happened I'm not going to insist that you do it my way. Not anymore. I want to give you some time off to think about what you want to do and where you want to go—the Army isn't all there is, as much as I love it and as far as it is my career—but you're only twenty-five and you've spent more than half your life having people make choices for you, starting with your father raising you as a Native American warrior back at Osan, your Aunt and Uncle making some choices for you that were not in your best interest and not in your control, to having that Iroquois boy who broke your heart tell you that you couldn't marry the person you chose, all the way up to having the military brig telling you when to get up, when to eat, when to dress, when to sleep—you need some time to make your own decisions and I'm going to give you that."

Without waiting for her to say anything, he turned to Charlie. "I realize it was hard on you, being in New Mexico so close to your family and your reservation and not being able to go and see them. And seeing as how Allie tells me you do have some leave time accumulated—a month, actually—I'm giving you that time off. Go see your family or whatever else you want to do after you escort Cam to her reservation in New York." Charlie nodded acquiescence.

"Permission to speak freely Sir." Cam stood and saluted.

"Permission granted, Corporal."

"Sir. I have no wish to leave the project. You and your group are the closest thing I have ever found that comes close to a military family like the one I experienced back at Osan, and I came to realize over the last couple of days since you got me out of Miramar that this was what I've been searching for my adult life. I love life on the reservation, it's quiet and peaceful and no one tells me what to do and I'm free…but it's also somewhat lonely and I missed the daily interpersonal interaction.

"I will take the leave you've granted me and use that think about what I really want out of life, but I suspect that when Specialist Ironknife returns to base at the end of his month I will be returning too. However, in the intervening time, please by all means feel free to re-present the court-martial paperwork; if my testimony is needed I will be more than happy to provide distance testimony or return here if my presence is required."

Hawk nodded. "All right. Thank you for your honesty, and I will follow up on your suggestions and let you know what happens—yes, Specialist Ironknife?"

"Sir." Charlie rose from his chair. "Your orders are for me to escort Corporal Arlington to her reservation. Are you ordering me to go on to New Mexico after that?"

"No, Specialist. You are free to do as you choose with your free time."

"Then in that case I will inform you that I intend to spend the month with Corporal Arlington on her reservation."

Cam jerked her head around, staring at Charlie in astonishment. Hawk had to fight to hide the smile. "I…you…me?" she squeaked.

Charlie flashed her a brilliant smile before returning his attention to Clayton again. It was Allie, however, who spoke.

"You know as base commander Clayton does have the right—and privilege—of marrying you two. Should we plan for that before you leave or after you get back?"

Cam choked. Charlie caught her as she staggered and held her upright, replying to Allie's comment with a poker face but a hint of amusement down in his dark eyes, "According to tradition, before a marriage can be planned the families of the intended party must meet and discuss the suitability—"

"You're suitable. Go ahead." Shana grinned at him.

"…and prior to that meeting a formal courtship and declaration of intent must be made. As a medicine woman of her tribe, and as the medicine man of my people, we both understand that the tribe's traditions must be upheld and preserved, and no one is above tribal law. Therefore, no matter how much I personally wish I could marry her now, traditions and forms must be upheld and permission sought and obtained from involved sources."

Cam was staring at him open-mouthed. "You know that means you have to talk to Jennifer. She's my Clan-mother and my sponsor, so you'd have to get her permission to marry me."

"I am looking forward to it." Charlie told her with a serene smile.

"And…well, Doc says I'm healed, but, Charlie…I don't know about my physical condition."

"Then we will find out together." The two of them seemed to have forgotten there was anyone else in the room as they turned to stand facing each other, the petite slim girl in fatigues, Charlie in his habitual half-military, half-native clothing. "I am looking forward to that too."


End file.
